Animated Video Series in the Museo CA2M Collections

A collection is always an unfinished narrative, constantly growing and evolving. It exists simultaneously in the present continuous, the past perfect and the future perfect. The Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) houses the Contemporary Art Collection of the Autonomous Community of Madrid, now called the CA2M Collection, and the ARCO Foundation Collection. Both collections emerged in the 1980s: the former following the approval of the Community of Madrid’s Statute of Autonomy in 1983, and the latter with the creation of the ARCO Foundation in 1987. It was during the 1990s, however, in a context marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of new cultural narratives, that both collections underwent significant expansion.

Today, alongside collecting, conserving, exhibiting and interpreting works, it is essential to reframe and recontextualise them in light of contemporary artistic practices and the evolving relationship between museums and their audiences. This approach allows issues traditionally considered central to be revisited from a critical perspective, while aspects previously regarded as marginal assume a leading role for new generations. Collections can therefore be presented through multiple narratives: from thematic approaches and reflections on artistic techniques to journeys devoted to particular artists or historical periods.

Animated Video Series

This edition focuses on the presence of video across both collections through a series of screenings organised into cycles that will take place throughout the exhibition period. These programmes invite audiences to reflect on the moving image from a range of perspectives while highlighting the potential of the audiovisual medium as a space for artistic experimentation.

The cycles form part of a constellation of practices that understand video as a catalyst for ways of seeing, forms of presence and modes of storytelling. In this context, the audiovisual apparatus ceases to function merely as a tool for documentation and instead becomes a situated and collective practice, closely linked to the social and cultural contexts in which it emerges.

The first of these programmes is devoted to animation as one of the thematic strands present within the collection. It brings together nine works by artists including Cristina Lucas, Vasava Artworks, Vicente Blanco, Paco Guillén, Marina Núñez, Lois Patiño, Leonor Serrano Rivas and Juan Zamora, whose practices explore drawing in motion from a variety of perspectives.

The audiovisual medium thus establishes a dialogue between the visual arts, cinema and animation, placing the selected works at the intersection of different languages that begin with drawing and expand towards handcrafted animation, film, music, dance and scenography.

Taking Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908)—widely considered the first film created entirely through animation and composed of more than seven hundred hand-drawn images in little over a minute—as its point of departure, Museo CA2M proposes a space in which to discover the line, technique and creative processes that shape the language of animated drawing and its evolution within contemporary art.

Selected videos

Vicente Blanco
Otra vez algo nuevo, 2006
Vídeo, 10 min 10 s

Paco Guillén
Sintonizando el lugar de la bandera, 2012
Vídeo, 5 min 33 s

Cristina Lucas
Pantone -500+2007, 2007
Vídeo, 41 min 57 s

Marina Núñez
El fuego de la visión (María), 2015
Vídeo, 1 min 50 s

Lois Patiño Lamas
Montaña en sombra, 2012
Vídeo, 13 min 52 s

Leonor Serrano Rivas
Estrella, 2018
Vídeo, 7 min 13 s

Vasava Artworks
Jerry´s Backenzahnoperationsträumelein, 2004
Video, 1 min 30 s

Juan Zamora
Media sirena, 2006
Vídeo, 10 min

Juan Zamora,
Media mosca, 2006
Vídeo, 10 min