Attendance open and free while places last

Just like the end of every school year, we are looking for a special way to kick off the summer. This year we’re inviting the artist Sara Manubens, who will suggest that we collectively create our own House Drag over the course of four days.

‘This workshop uses the tools of the art of drag as creative power for working with ourselves. I am suggesting an open, sensitive space where all bodies, concerns, fantasies, fears and illusions have a place, with the goal of sharing. We want to share who we are, who we want to be, what makes us uneasy and what we reject. And we will transform all of this into artistic material. How? Through drag art technologies: lip syncing, choreography, exaggerated theatre, makeup, humour and vibrant emotions. We’ll do it through friendship and being together, because that is House Drag: a horizontal space of mutual support to make life happier.’

This summer, the museum is turning into a space designed to combat the heat just like it’s always been done: where it’s cool, with no hurry and in good company. Inspired by those perennial places where idleness is fine, this project is turning the museum into a summer refuge where you can simply exist.

La Fresquera is a place where time stands still a little, where you can come read, play cards, talk… or simply do nothing. A place where the cool air is appreciated, like when you used to sit in your doorway in good company with a pitcher of water next to you.

La Fresquera isn’t an activity; it’s an attitude. It’s opening the museum’s doors to turn it into that courtyard, square or porch where you love to be. We’ve prepared a series of comfortable, quiet spaces full of plants where you can feel at home.

We care for your plants. Watering Can Initiative

We know that many people go on holiday in summer and don’t know what to do with their plants. At La Fresquera, we are thinking about them, too, and that’s why we are launching the Watering Can Initiative. From 25 June to 15 September, the museum is offering to care for the plants of the residents of Móstoles. All you have to do is fill out a form to choose the days you want to leave us your plants and tell us how to care for them, and we’ll do the rest: find the best spot for them, water them, even talk to them if needed… Here we treat them like they’re one of the family.

Let the drum roll start, the fans flutter and the families get ready, because the festival is about to begin!

The museum is turning into a square, a place of revelry, a meeting point, and it’s opening its doors two at a time to welcome all families in a celebration filled with joy, creativity and unforgettable moments. Welcome to the big celebration of the year!

Because doing needlework and dancing—it’s all about getting started… Let’s gather to celebrate what we’ve shared, what we’ve created and what we’ve experienced! This celebration brings together everyone we’ve worked with throughout the year to close the season enthusiastically with the proposals of the artists who have unquestionably nailed it!

Stars of this big celebration:

Baiven with the kids from ‘Dancing the Neighbourhood’ (Alba Sáenz-López Aumente and Mar Sáenz-López Aumente) have held the Dancing the Neighbourhood workshop on Tuesday afternoons throughout the entire school year. It’s a meeting point for neighbourhood kids where they have discovered dance in unexpected places, expanding their view of movement in the world. What might they be preparing for us for this occasion?

Adriana Reyes and Goya Batalla Batalla have held the From those clays, these seams workshop for nursery and primary school kids, bringing boxes filled with thread, yarn and thimbles, filled with stories they have shared around the pleasure of embroidery. What stories are concealed in those thimbles?

Tania Arias Winogradow, with whom we’ve built real nests where you can rest inside the museum, accompanied by Santiago Rapallo and Eleni Chaidemenaki, suggest a very special afternoon snack for this festive day. Do we really always have to eat sitting around a table?

And now… raise the curtain, play the music and make sure everyone’s here! Because this celebration is not only a party; it’s an homage to everything we’ve experienced. Thanks for stitching this year together with us! See you next year—and keep up this shared joy!

Dear citizens,

We have declared ourselves the mayors of that place called Picnic Sessions 2025 of the CA2M Museum in Móstoles and we’re inviting you to its annual festival.

We’re going to celebrate this festival’s BIG DAY, but we’ve shattered time, so the day will stretch along six Thursdays from 29 May to 3 July.

On the first day, there will be something resembling opening speeches, bingo and a tasting, and the following Thursday we’ll celebrate a kind of dance-and-vermouth and a kind of community meal. The next one will be for afternoon socialising and then the night-time event, and lastly will come the fanfares.

All of these metaphors will involve artistic activities that will be incredible and magical in many ways, including performances, lip syncs, dances, staged pieces, concerts, DJ sessions and more.

The master of ceremonies all six days will be La Sorny, a brilliant club kid. She’ll guide us through this extended, vibrant day of celebrating, doing wonderful things, caring for one another and laughing together, and creating a space where all of this can happen.

Signed: the picnic mayor’s office that loves you.

Lara Brown and Anto Rodríguez.

PROGRAMME ►(download the full programme here)

The Museo CA2M is collaborating in the fifth and latest edition of Domingo, the performing arts festival hosted by La Casa Encendida and curated by Fernando Gandasegui that over the last five years has brought together national and international artists to encourage experimental languages.

As in previous editions, Domingo 2025 revolves around listening to what is happening on the current scene, delving deeper into the main themes that the programme has explored over the years: the convergence and opening of different disciplines, generations and geographical regions; the protagonism of the voice and the performativity of sound; the power of the political and sensitive agency of images and imagination; the exercise of joyful criticism in art practice; the proposal of alternatives for encounter and transmission between audiences and artists; somato-political practices in southern Europe; and, above all, the promotion and dissemination of radically experimental languages to counteract the flattening effect of neoliberal trends.

Thursday 13 March SUI. Free admission on a first come, first served basis.

• 19:00 ORELLES VOLADORES Nilo Gallego
• 20:15 CLARALINDA, CLARALINDA, CLARALINDA Luísa Saraiva

ORELLES VOLADORES. Nilo Gallego 19:00h Approximate duration: 1 hour

In Orelles voladores, Nilo Gallego surrenders to his experience as a percussionist and sound recordist while inviting the audience to search for a new music theory and a new sense of tuning through simplicity and honesty. Because every sound that reaches our ears, bounced back and filtered through all the materials it encounters along the way, has a story to tell; a story which, over the years, we learn to ignore over and which this piece invites us to rediscover.

Orelles voladores is a percussion concert in which the artist encourages us to form a percussion orchestra with our eardrums, and use the act of listening as our drumsticks. The concert changes every time it is performed, adapting to each space and situation. For this occasion, the performance will also feature the percussionist Frankuu Carrascosa and An Amateur Choir, the open project based at the Museo CA2M that has been operating for eight years and of which Nilo himself is a member.

Nilo Gallego (Ponferrada, León) is a musician and artist who gives performances in which experimentation with sound is the starting point. His pieces always have a playful element and seek interaction with the immediate environment and the ordinary. He is a member of the experimental action collective Orquestina de pigmeos (with Chus Domínguez) and regularly works with creators like Silvia Zayas, Alex Reynolds and the company Societat Doctor Alonso. He plays drums, percussion and electronic devices, and in addition to musical creation he designs soundscapes for contemporary theatre and dance companies. He has presented his work at national and international live arts festivals. He also designs tools and runs educational workshops based on listening and sound creation.

Credits Creation and performance: Nilo Gallego. Collaborations: Frankuu Carrascosa and An Amateur Choir. Audiovisual coordination and accompaniment: Chus Domínguez. Writing support: Álex Reynolds.. Co-production: TNT (Terrassa Noves Tendencies) Festival; Residencies with the support of : Espai nyamnyam, El Consulado Fonteta, Espacio Los Barros, La Poderosa and L’Estruch.

CLARALINDA, CLARALINDA, CLARALINDA Luísa Saraiva 20:15h Approximate duration: 40 minutes

Claralinda, Claralinda, Claralinda is a choreographic songbook in which Luísa Saraiva shares her practice and extensive research on the physicality of singing, the limits of the female voice and the haptic nature of sound. Analysing different types of songs and instruments and travelling through excerpts from her works, she explores the sonic possibilities between breathing, sound and singing through a movement practice that visually presents the physical effort involved in controlling the breath. The songs are added, transformed and improvised according to the research and process in which Luísa is engaged at a given time. Her musical universe is inspired by traditional folk songs from central and northern Portugal.

Luisa Saravia is a choreographer who lives between Porto and Berlin. Her artistic practice investigates the language of the body and voice, situated at the intersection between movement and musical composition. Her work is deeply influenced by research on the physicality of the voice and a contemporary, non-essentialist perspective of folklore and tradition.  Luísa studied psychology at the University of Porto and dance at the Folkwang Arts University in Essen, Germany. She has worked with artists from different disciplines, such as Lea Letzel, Carlos Azeredo Mesquita and Senem Gökce Ogultekin. She has received grants for several art research programmes and in 2019 she was selected for the danceWEB programme and was a choreographer-in-residence at K3 | Tanzplan Hamburg. In 2022/2023 she received the Tanzpraxis grant from the city of Berlin. Since 2020 she has been an activist in the field of mental health in performing arts, promoting workshops and lectures.

Credits Choreography and performance: Luísa Saraiva. Instrument: Inês Tartaruga Água. Acknowledgements: João dos Santos Martins and Associação Parasita.

In association with: 

The book 1502 Persons Facing the Wall is the outcome of the research and work undertaken around the Santiago Sierra exhibition being held at the CA2M museum until 2 February 2025. This publication brings together images of Sierra’s characteristic ‘inverse’ portraits and finds resonance in the profound, insightful texts by Alexis Callado, Rosa Martínez, Georg Imdahl, Juan Albarrán, José Luis Corazón, Pilar Villela and Gonzalo Abaha. The book immerses us in a striking picture of the artist and the questions he asks about power and its effects. The publication not only documents the exhibition but also becomes a tool of reflection on the networks shaping our realities.

The activity will feature Carlos TMori (designer), Juan Albarrán (author of one of the texts), Sandra Guimaraes (director of the Helga de Alvear Museum), Alexis Callado (exhibition curator) and Tania Pardo (director of the CA2M Museum).

The ‘Variation 90’ sound activity, directed by Ugo Martínez Lázaro, will be held after the launch. In this piece, the artist aims to manifest and allegorically question forms of social domination and alienation by evoking purification rituals that combine creativity and community resistance. Four experimental musicians take part acoustically in the space for forty minutes to explore the conceptual tensions in Sierra’s work. This collective event will feature Ugo Martínez, Arianna Cana Mackenzie, Doris Steinbichler and Narcoléptica.

Carlos TMori is a graphic designer of publications, visual artist, contemporary art curator and associate professor in the Bachelor’s in Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca. He has a PhD in Fine Arts and two bachelor’s degrees in Fine Arts and Audiovisual Communication. As a graphic designer, he has worked for companies like una más una and La Fábrica and for cultural institutions like the Ministry of Culture, the Foreign Ministry, the DA2 Art Centre, the Conde Duque Contemporary Culture Centre and the MUSAC and Es Baluard museums.

Juan Albarrán is a professor in the Department of Art History and Theory at the Autonomous University of Madrid. His lines of research revolve around contemporary artistic practices and discourses, especially the relationships between art and politics in Spain since the transition to democracy, theories of photography and performance, and representations of torture in contemporary visual culture. He has published the books Disputas sobre lo contemporáneo. Arte español entre el antifranquismo y la postmodernidad (2019) and Performance y arte contemporáneo. Discursos, prácticas, problemas (2019) on these issues, and he has edited the collectively-written volumes Arte y transición (2012 and 2018), Llámalo Performance: historia, disciplina y recepción (with Iñaki Estella, 2015) and Ensayo/Error. Tentativas interartísticas en el Estado español (with Rosa Benéitez, 2018).

Alexis Callado has a degree in Art History from the University of Havana. His curatorial practice includes solo exhibitions with Carlos Pazos (La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana), as well as group exhibitions (Ante nuestros ojos, Loop Festival, Barcelona; Culto Digestivo, Conarte, Monterey) and collaborative projects like Lab Latino, Eighteenth Arte Paiz Biennial, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. He is an active promoter of exchanges between the Spanish and Latin American art scenes. He helped to choose, coordinate and produce publishing projects in graphic art, photography and sculptural objects for the company Arte y Naturaleza of Madrid. He has organised artistic projects in Sweden, Spain, France, Guatemala, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Cuba. He partners with publications, museums, associations and centres specialised in contemporary art. He is a member of the Transatlantic Network and is a co-founder of The Curatorial Bureau.

Tania Pardo is the director of the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo of the Community of Madrid. She was the Fine Arts advisor of the Community of Madrid until July 2019. Before that, she was in charge of the Exhibition Department at Madrid’s La Casa Encendida. She has also served as a curator at MUSAC, Contemporary Art Museum of Castilla y León, and as the head of programming in the Laboratorio 987 space. She has been the director of projects at the Fundación Santander 2016 (2009–2010) and associate professor of Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid. She has recently curated the Cristina Garrido show The Origin of Forms at the CA2M Museum, and Bird Machine Dream by Teresa Solar Abboud at the same museum along with Claudia Segura in a co-production with MACBA and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin.

Sandra Guimarães (Oporto) is the director of the Helga de Alvear Museum in Cáceres. Her career in the visual arts spans around twenty years and includes posts like the Artistic Director of the Bombas Gens Centre d’Art (Valencia) between 2020 and 2023. Guimarães was the curator of the Serralves Museum (Oporto, Portugal) between 1998 and 2010 and the founding director of programmes at the Remai Modern (Saskatoon, Canada) between 2015 and 2019. At Serralves, she organised exhibitions of contemporary artists like Alvess, Artur Barrio, Thomas Hirschhorn, Cristina Iglesias, Barry Le Va and Dan Graham, among others, and co-curated the exhibition The 80’s. At the Remai Modern, she co-curated the programme prior to the museum’s opening, as well as its inaugural exhibition, Field Guide. Her training includes a master’s in Art History and Archaeology (specialisation in Modern and Contemporary Art) and a master’s in Cultural Management, both from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium).

Ugo Martínez Lázaro merges art and the social sciences with an experimental approach to sound and music. He combines documentary research, texts, music and on-the-ground experiences in projects involving comics, installations and sound art. He co-directs Pirotecnia, a trans-disciplinary improvisation ensemble, which issued an LP with the Madrid Town Hall in 2022, a limited edition of 300 hand-painted records, including a comic he designed, which is available in Madrid and Mexico.

Arianna Cana Mackenzie is a Cuban musician and producer living in Spain. She plays multiple instruments, like the clarinet, the saxophone and the flute. She started studying clarinet at the age of ten in Camagüey and continued at the National Music School and Art College of Havana, where she has also taught. She has worked with the Camagüey Symphony and the ICRT. She conducted the Limpopo Youth Orchestra in South Africa, where she explored Afro-Cuban folklore in Europe, Africa and the Caribbean.

Narcoléptica is the alias of Beatriz Vaca (Seville, 1985), who holds a bachelor’s in Fine Arts and is a self-taught musician. She has been creating experimental electro-acoustic music influenced by psychodelia, ambient music, noise and post-rock since 2006. She processes electric guitar, piano, synthesisers and voice to generate exciting sound experiences. She has issued her own records, contributed to soundtracks and performance pieces and stood out on tours around Europe and Latin America with powerful live presentations.

Doris Steinbichler (Vienna, 1965) is a vocal improvisational artist and creator of transmedia performances in Austria and Mexico. She has won awards in Mexico in performance and radio and has founded projects like ‘Remediar’, ‘Trinchera Ensemble’ and ‘4shrooms’. Her works explore vocal experimentation and multimedia and have been presented at important museums and festivals. In 2023, she celebrated thirty years of her career at Ex Teresa Arte Actual (CdMX), reaffirming her contribution to transdisciplinary art.

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.