Activity

Moderated by Eva Garrido and Marta van Tartwijk

We avoid touching, fluids and drops of saliva. We cover our mouth, our nose and hands. Our reading group over the last few years has explored the oddities of the body and queer bodies. Now that reality is like science fiction, we will turn our attention to the aliens, vampires and bearded women which we have met along the way.

Last year, Birds Fuck in the Air endeavoured to address and think about the different textures of desire and its strange manifestations. Given the unforeseen imposition of the prohibition of touching, a distance was established that nonetheless could perhaps increase the idea of eroticism. And how lovers start to write to each other. We write a lot. Even distances become elastic and we can feel something touching us, that words and tongues walk all over us.

The task of writing, like desire, is perhaps always an unfinished task. One writes to continue writing. The stroller, by definition, is not going anywhere in particular, but is driven by the mere desire to walk. Going nowhere in order to maybe eventually arrive somewhere.

Among our desires as a group, this year we wish to recover one, to read a single book. Perhaps it is the right moment to think together about distances and the potential of strolling. This motor action of putting one step forward and then the other, to take our bodies to different places, opens up a horizon of possibilities and readings to discover the world through the body and the body through the world.

INTEMPERIE ***

Upcoming sessions: 24 September, 15 October, 5 November, 16 November and 17 December at CA2M and the Delirio bookstore in Móstoles. There we will plan a series of routes based on the book Wanderlust. Una historia del caminar, by Rebecca Solnit.

The only requisite for taking part is to have read the texts before each session and to take part with a participative spirit.

More information: educacion.ca2m@madrid.org / 912 760 227

After months without being able to be physically present in the museum, we are now returning to our performative walkthroughs in order to recover a shared closeness in our exhibitions. We will have to relearn how to move simultaneously through the exhibition halls, to keep our distance while remaining close, to invent new ways of looking after each other, of listening to one another and to share. To this end, the walkthroughs will be limited to a maximum of 10 people. Wednesdays at 7:00 pm and Sundays at 12:30 pm we will explore the exhibition Absurd Humour: A Constellation of Folly in Spain and Saturdays at 7:00 pm Francesc Ruiz. Panal.

To enrol, send a message to educacion.ca2m@madrid.org or call 91 276 02 21. You can also turn up personally at the museum and, if there is still room, you can join the walkthrough, simply leaving your personal details at reception. We are taking all these measures in order to look after one another, and we must be aware that they may be modified with the changing situation. We’re really looking forward to taking these walkthroughs of the museum with you once again.

RESOURCES

From the collection catalogued on our web, we propose ways of looking and position-taking, of listening to one another, and to thus mutate into a body that takes shape among the images. Through motion, making with your hands, thinking in a low voice, giving it your all dancing, stopping for a pause, losing yourself, reading with other authors, answering questions, we propose a series of places and images to look at the collection as much together as we can.

• Alicia Framis, The Walking Ceiling
• Ángeles Marco, Ascensor Oblicuo
• Ciuco Gutiérrez, Locura de amor
• Elina Brotheus, L'étang
• Itziar Okariz, Mear en espacios públicos
• Kiko Pérez, Sin título (Dos manos)
• Mariana Castillo Deball, Maske
• Nora Aurrekoetxea, Milena
• Olafur Eliasson, Moss-series
• Patricia Esquivias, Mural recuperado, Manuel S. Molezún, 1958
• Wilfredo Prieto, Cuba Libre
• Zoe Leonard, I want a president

Para que os lo gocéis en casa, el colectivo Autoplacer/Sindicalistas ha preparado “Archiplacer”, una playlist con 101 temas de artistas que han pasado por el festival durante sus diez años de vida. ¡Que lo disfrutéis!

On Monday 18 May we will be celebrating International Museum Day, with this year’s theme of “Museums for Equality: Diversity and Inclusion”. Despite the fact that our doors are still closed, we will celebrate the importance of institutions like ours throughout the whole week on our social media.
 

We will begin by defending the essential role played by all the people who have continued working in the museum throughout the confinement: security and cleaning staff, who ensure that it is maintained in optimum conditions for the day when we are able to return. For many years now, we have been refocusing our collections so that the acquisitions we make respond to criteria of equality, for instance enhancing exhibitions by women artists who still do not enjoy the institutional recognition they deserve. Besides our commitment with gender inclusivity, we are also working to ensure the visibility and representation of all forms of life, expanding the LGTBIQ perspective in our programming and collection, but also introducing intersectional criteria that includes raciality: it is fundamental to focus on issues of racism and our own institutional role in its networks of exclusion, a task that is still a long way from being completed.
 

Here at CA2M, many unexpected situations take place in the encounter between visitors and the material culture preserved here. The exhibition halls are a place where we can meet strangers, but there is also a peculiar physical encounter between objects and people. We believe that life in the museum, to be completely inclusive, has to be aware that it is a space of coexistence, a place where the aesthetic experience enables us to recover the magical dimension of things and species.
 

In May 2007, the Mexican artist Damián Ortega installed Obelisco transportable in Doris C. Freedman Plaza in New York. This obelisk on wheels is a biting comment on the displacement of the centres in big cities and the stability of symbols of power in the city space. Today this obelisk is in Móstoles, lying prostrate in our storeroom. It could be raised to its feet (or wheels) any given day here in our own halls or could travel to some other place, to mark the spot of a new centre. The screens of our smartphones or laptops become our portable exhibition halls, places of power where discourses and reflections are directed, affecting our emotions and consciences or helping us to imagine a new representation of the world. The radical experience of the body’s relationship with everything else will still have to wait another few weeks, when we open our doors once again and brush the cobwebs off the exhibition on absurd humour in Spain. But this museum, CA2M, will continue latent like a sleeping portable obelisk.
 

Happy International Museum Day!