educacion.ca2m@madrid.org

Raising our own flag on the museum’s façade for one minute. Inventing colour palettes that we’ll use to build the landscape of Móstoles precisely at thirty minutes past noon. Bringing our bodies together close, really, really close, until we become a huge rock. Doing meditation exercises on the building’s rooftop or imagining the sunset-tinged evening sky.

These are just a few of the experiences that the students who visited the museum had. During the school year, we offer activities designed for groups of secondary and baccalaureate students that revolve around the exhibitions and seek to generate meaningful experiences. Our project aims to forge a direct tie between contemporary artistic practices and students with the goal of revitalising and bringing new life to the museum’s spaces. To do so, we approach the exhibitions as spaces of creation and collective inquiry.

This time, we’ll work with the exhibitions of Santiago Sierra and Sol Calero. Exploring these two shows will enable us to connect with topics like identity, migration, power and exclusion. This experience seeks to not only expand students’ understanding of contemporary social and cultural issues but also generate spaces for critical thinking. It is an encounter designed with the desire to share knowledge, practices and experiences and to debate the content of the exhibitions with the students.

With this approach in mind, we have invited the artist Marta van Tartwijk to work with us to come up with and design strategies to activate the exhibition spaces.

Marta van Tartwijk (Barcelona, 1990) has a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid and furthered her training at the École Superieur d’Art de Bretagne (France), the University of Barcelona and A*Desk. She has exhibited and developed her work in different institutions like Fabra i Coats, INJUVE, Sala de Arte Joven, TEA Tenerife, La Capella, Bilbaoarte, DosMares and Matadero. In her practice, she explores how images can access personal experience and serve as a hinge that articulates times, contexts and subjective experiences by experimenting with body and language.

This summer, we’ll all be fish. The children in the summer cabin will become a huge school of fish. Fish without a sea and with just one place to swim: in the museum.

We need three things to dance: body, space and time. What happens when we interplay these three elements?

Swimming suddenly becomes a way of dancing.

We share a space. We have a museum. We walk around the museum; we dance around the museum. We guide, follow and seek a common respite. How do we choose which direction to go in? Who chooses the direction of our route? If we all stop, will we keep dancing?

We are inviting children aged 6 to 12 to dive through the depths of this ocean along with Baiven. Just like every year, the CA2M Museum is scheduling this activity with the goal of creating a space where artists and creators can share their inquiries with the participants. This time, the sessions will revolve around the body, dance and groupwork.

The workshop will be taught by Alba Sáenz-López Aumente and Mar Sáenz-López Aumente. They are dancers, choreographers, sisters, cultural mediators and the founders of the Baiven collective, a group that uses dance to foster the horizontal exchange of experiences, perspectives, knowledge and critical thinking.

They develop activities that explore the performing arts and education. They seek engagement and interaction with communities and territories and try to expand art’s professional arena by creating accessible, diverse spaces where anyone can find a place, regardless of their situation, body and mind.

Witnessing the End is a programme of outings to places where terminal events happen, like the end of a motorway, the mountains of Madrid and the botanical garden. It is also a lecture on the impossibility of conservation at the CA2M Museum. At these springtime gatherings, we will think collectively about the stories told in our culture about denouements, resisting death and the beauty of disappearing as we hover air-borne over the precipice in the car together.

This People’s University programme, targeted at anyone interested in contemporary artistic practices, expands the concept of knowledge conveyance to introduce contemporary art, and it heads out in search of shared experiences that make us think as artists both inside and outside the museum.

PROGRAM 

APRIL 10. Keeping out the cold. Excursion to the Guadarrama Mountains. 

24 APRIL. De-veiling the Collection. Lecture and visit to the CA2M Museum warehouses.

Hache, i, jota, ka, 
ele, eme, ene, a, 
que si tú no me quieres, 
otro niño me querrá.

[‘H, I, J, K,

L, M, N, A

If you don’t love me

Another boy will.’

Spanish children’s song called El Patio de mi Casa]

Children’s songs serve as the common thread of memories, generations and lives separated in space and time. They are clearly meant to be fun, but they can also be educational. What do children’s folk songs teach us? What reality do they reflect? We are not trying to constrain creativity but instead aim to analyse what the lyrics of these songs from another era say, a time when girls were frightened away by spiders, men put their wives in a pumpkin shell, and ladies trotted but gentlemen galloped.[AS1] 

We’ll mix elderly people’s memories and young people’s intuition to turn those perennial children’s songs into songs of our lives today by changing the lyrics, trying out new instruments and inventing a dance for any age. We’ll have fun with the entire family as we use music and play to help us reconsider those intergenerational tunes and make them more ours, more open, more contemporary, in a bid to give them many more years of life.

PROGRAMME

FEBRUARY

Saturday 17 February from 4:30—6:30 pm

Saturday 24 February from 11am—1 pm

MARCH

Saturday 9 March from 4:30—6:30 pm

Saturday 16 March from 11am—1 pm

NOTE:  We recommend this activity for children aged 5 and older. However, any younger children in your group/family are more than welcome. We will try to adapt the pace to all participants.

In 2016, Atilio González and Elia Maqueda set up a group (Ruiseñora) and had a daughter, and these two events have largely determined their lives since then. They have published several records on the Raso Estudio label, a mix of electronic and traditional music, the project’s hallmark and one of the first in the new line of work to revive folklore by looking at the past in order to face the future. They have held family concerts with audiences and often hold concerts for their own family (they always compose, rehearse and record at home). They have also coordinated workshops and artistic projects in museums like the Reina Sofía and the Vostell Malpartida.

In this programme, we are inviting different artistic collectives who are families to imagine the shared space where they can pool their creative processes and interests and create together with other people, a space where age and skill don’t matter, a new space-time where you can share with your people, neighbours, chosen families, grandparents, grandchildren.