Isidoro Valcárcel Medina (Murcia, 1937) is an important representative of conceptual art in Spain, hardly known outside of Spanish speaking countries. His body of work includes performances, sound pieces, architectural projects, installations and books. From his early practice up to the present day, he has asserted a critical attitude towards both art institutions and the art market, developing instead situations and scenarios that allow him to engage in a more directly affective relation with his audience.

Bulegoa z/b is a collaborative initiative based in Bilbao, Spain. Its members, Beatriz Cavia, Miren Jaio, Isabel de Naverán and Leire Vergara come from backgrounds in both visual arts and social theory. Their initiative, an ‘office for art and knowledge’ is created around a common interest in processes of historization, cultural translation, performativity, the body, postcolonialism, social theory, archival strategies and education. Their varied professional backgrounds allow for a myriad of methodologies within their many projects.

If I Can’t Dance recently asked Bulegoa z/b about their thoughts on the potential of research to move beyond a methodology for acquiring knowledge, and towards a production-based outcome that makes new meanings. They answered: “We share the idea of archival research being able to reactivate documents of the past and present. A document cannot materially change, but the eyes that look at it do change, time always changes our perspective, and the document itself will also affect whoever looks at it. Therefore the image of the researcher of archival material as someone who deals with inert study objects is a bit of a cliché. We all have to negotiate images and documents every day, constantly managing the distance at which we keep them. This becomes evident in our perception of distancing, estrangement and dissociation regarding what surrounds us. Besides generating anxiety, understanding this way of seeing things can turn out to be very useful in a research context understood as an imaginative practice. It can be an instrument that, paradoxically, allows us to negotiate the temporal, recover a historical and critical sense and, with a bit of luck, soothe some of that anxiety.

The work of Valcárcel Medina is evidence of this transforming and reactivating capacity of research as imaginative practice. 2.000 d. de J.C (2001), for example, is a book that covers two thousand years of history through two thousand historically insignificant events, one per year and page, illustrating a coherent and rigorous methodology guided by the principle of “exploiting and exhausting the possibilities of the subject up to their logical conclusion”. The book offers the reader the possibility of experiencing time in different ways. It is a receptacle of temporary spaces: two thousand years contained in the volume occupied in space; the five years that the artist dedicated to research, financed by subscribers; the number of hours needed to read the book in various ways (the whole two thousand years read in one sleepless night, a couple of years read in chronological order, single years randomly selected…).”