Activity

On 1 October we will present the publication Ciudad Sur. Costa Marrón. Un recorrido del ladrillo al gresite en la construcción del tiempo libre [Southern City. Brown Coast: A Journey from Brick to Stoneware in Leisure Construction] at the CA2M Museum, the outcome of the programme by the same name which was held with the artist Irene de Andrés and La Liminal collective over the course of eight sessions between October 2023 and May 2024.

This space of shared experimentation has proposed an approach to Móstoles as post-tourist guides to travel through a series of architectures made up of layers of time, experiences and lived moments around what we call leisure, based on topics like tourism, the idea of the hero, public space, the centre-periphery binomial, neighbourhood struggles, speculation, displacements, gentrification and urban planning programmes (PAUs). 

Like an archive, the reporting by Blanca Sotos contains the multiple voices of those who participated in its third edition. The compilation of different materials—texts, poems, stories, transcribed conversations, key terms and concepts and maps of the walks—aims to reflect the sessions in which the participants visited swimming pools and sports centres, shopping centres and (anti-)shopping centres, cultural spaces, public parks and the town’s famous bullring.

This space will also serve to kick off this year’s edition, which begins in late October.

‘After walking aimlessly; we want to go back, go back to find ourselves (again), to drop anchor and renovate ourselves; through our bonds’.

A ‘bond’ is officially defined as the union or tie between one person or thing and another. But is a union the same as a tie? Do we need to feel bonded and/or tied to other people or things? What effect does these bonds or ties have on us? Do they make us free or suffocate us?

We want to tinker with what is taken for granted to discover new sea floors, embark on artistic expressions and dive into tales and stories, told and sung, to play and share voyages, ours and others.

We want to lay down roots, enter the cliché, tack around the conventional definitions of our unions and ties without fear of diving into the abyss, floating on the water or drowning, but in the same boat.

This is an invitation.

At the CA2M Museum, dispossessed but rooted, we’ll engage in sensorial and delightful interpretations like: The summer when my mother had green eyes. We’ll listen to the creaking of the woodworm. We’ll see if there’s any truth behind what Verónica tells us and whether our attachments are as fierce as Gornick’s. We’ll talk about love with Carver, and Lucía Berlín’s bitterness may make us tremble. Through our sessions, we may consider creating new kinship ties with Donna: will we continue with the problem or not?

We’re looking forward to seeing you.

Moderated by Las Hijas de Yocasta [Daughters of Jocasta]

We are Las Hijas de Yocasta: Ana Isabel Fernández, Ángela Solano, Rebeca Contador and Sandra Cabrera. A mother, a mother-grandmother and four daughters. We are driven by childhood, patients, walking amidst stones, what art suggests to us. We read. We reread.  We listen. We are the resistance of the CA2M Museum’s reading groups and we’re here to stir everything up.

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.