Education

At the start of each school year, we embark on a new artist residency project. This year, we will be joined by artist Lidia Toga, who will be working with the school’s two fourth-grade classes.

Every day, when break time ends, the playground at CEIP Federico García Lorca falls completely still. The children return to their classrooms and, for a brief moment, the playground is suspended in silence. That is when they begin to appear, one by one. They have been watching from the roof of the primary school building for some time, still but alert, as though waiting for a signal known only to them. Once the bell falls silent, they make their way down to the ground with purposeful steps, following the same choreography each day.

They approach the bins and carefully pull out biscuit packets, scraps of pastries and milkshake cartons. What the human creatures carefully placed in the bins during break time ends up scattered across the ground and turned into food. The school’s birds (magpies, wagtails, monk parakeets, pigeons, sparrows and starlings) feast while the children do multiplication and dictation exercises in their classrooms. This is how the birds find food in winter: by following the traces we leave behind.

This simple scene—a small, almost unnoticed gesture—is the starting point for the project we will share with Lidia Toga throughout the winter, spring, summer and autumn of 2026. Lidia walks slowly, letting her gaze linger where almost no one else thinks to look. She watches the birds patiently and draws them with the same care: every line is a way of listening to them, of learning how they inhabit the world. We want to take this everyday coexistence between people and birds—so close to us, yet so easily overlooked—as our starting point, and learn to observe it with greater responsibility and care.

The playground is a territory where many forms of life coexist, although the pace of the school day often leaves us little time to stop and notice them. We want to open up this space: to recognise those who inhabit it and help the children understand how our actions affect the cycles and needs of those who fly, walk or hide among the branches.

Lidia Toga (Madrid, 1980) is an artist specialising in illustration, painting and mural art, with a career spanning almost two decades. Since 2018, she has been researching biodiversity and the relationship between rivers and cities, building an extensive archive around the Manzanares and Río de Oro in Melilla. Her work has resulted in exhibitions, publications, works on paper and community projects, including a large-scale mural in Melilla. Since 2010, she has led workshops for children at venues including La Casa Encendida and schools, as well as in her own studio by the river. Her practice centres on interspecies coexistence and rethinking the place of humans within nature. She advocates careful observation and a reciprocal relationship with ecosystems and their inhabitants.

At one of our meetings last school year, Goya told us that her [AS1] school, Zaleo, would no longer have students aged three to six. This news heralded the end of an educational model that has vanished over time, just like many other schools for children aged birth to six.

Based on this revelation, our conversations revolved around how this change not only affected schools but also community life. We nostalgically recalled parks that used to ring out with children’s laughter and unexpected discoveries in the morning: carefully tracing the route taken by an ant, looking at the shape of leaves, strolling through the market and being fascinated by its rhythm. We imagined how with larger student-to-teacher ratios per classroom, schools could no longer allow themselves the luxury of spending the mornings on outdoor activities. This scene, which is common yet exceptional, will never be repeated.

And we wondered about the consequences of this. What learning opportunities were we depriving the children of? We want to keep the image of young explorers on the streets before it disappears completely, valuing the lessons they can learn and discoveries they can make in parks, squares and markets.

This academic year 2024–2025, we are carrying on with the project of partnering with the EnterArte collective. This project, which focuses on education for children aged birth to six, aspires to transform our museum and classrooms into laboratories of experimentation about education and art. We want to strengthen our bonds through gatherings and activities that connect us with the essence of childhood.  With this partnership, we are seeking to make the museum a more accessible space adapted to this age group.

Last school year we worked on a project that involved the UFIL Pablo Neruda and the children’s residence of Móstoles. The goal was to create our own space in the residence’ garden that catered to the children’s wishes. Throughout the entire year, we partnered with the designer Curro Claret and the carpentry group at the UFIL to develop the prototype of a modular structure that the children could transform into whatever they want: a house, a stage, a platform for sleeping, a cave or even a swing.

In early summer, we completed the project with an opening party for the house. It was exciting to watch how the children made it their own as they explored the space. That has become a starting point, an excuse to take yet another step. We want to invite artists and creators to intervene in this space in order to resignify it as a place of work and research along with the children. This is only the beginning.

Soft House is a collaborative project with the children’s residence of Móstoles that aims to serve as an invitation to reconsider what a house means. It is a place to reflect on the concept of the nuclear family, to challenge it and suggest new ways of designing and intervening in our surroundings.

For some years now, the museum has worked closely with García Lorca school in Móstoles. Over this time, we have witnessed its teachers’ incredible commitment, who understand that educational practice is primarily a form of activism and a commitment to the surroundings and to the community near the school.

One clear example of this commitment is the school radio station, an initiative that involves the entire school. This radio station has not only allowed students to create their own content but has also become a mouthpiece for our museum and its programmes.

This academic year, we want to work with the school team to create a new project that inspires us and encourages us to think in the long term by establishing a shared language through which our two institutions can engage in dialogue and grow together.

Over these years, we have talked about the spaces around the school, their boundaries and their potential as new places of learning. Inspired by this vision, we have decided to develop an open classroom project using the school’s outdoor areas and vacant lots that connect it to the neighbourhood. It is a pedagogical approach based on self-building and play to create a space of encounter where students, teachers, families, and we ourselves can share, learn and live.

The universe is an indomitable force that cuts through our very existence and shapes our spirit. We are sorceresses, clairvoyants and mediums from birth, experts in the power of divination, clairvoyance and communication with the great beyond. If you’re reading this, fate and cosmic vibrations attracted you to this page so you could communicate with us. We can channel the essence of elements to attract positive energy and stave off the evil eye. We will reveal the answers to your existential questions and attract balance to your life to fill it with light and spiritual wellbeing. Request information, no strings attached.

You’re not on the wrong page. Cultural mediation can have a bit of divination, witchcraft and esotericism about it. Mediation for Five Handrails is a collaborative project between AMECUM and the CA2M Museum throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, where we rethought mediation itself in its context by putting the mediator’s body in the centre, amidst so many objects and words. This project is also regarded as an inquiry revolving around two lines of action at AMECUM: reflection and experimentation in mediation, good practices and other ways of seeing it; and bringing visibility and recognition to the figure of the cultural mediator.

Through this announcement, we want to invite you to the project presentation, where we’ll share the results of the inquiry conducted by AMECUM, which started with an invitation from the CA2M Museum to conduct visits to the exhibitions. Thus, we wanted to engage in an open act/performance/ritual to freeze time and record the fleeting footprints of our mediations, which still exist as living spectres.