18 pictures and 19 stories

La memoria propia, es la mejor fuente de documentación. (1) (…) porque, si falla, será porque no era necesario conservable. [(Personal memory is the best source of documentation. (…) because, if it fails, it means there was no need to keep it.]

I can’t help but to think about these words I read in an interview with Isidoro Valcárcel Medina just before going to the performance 18 pictures and 18 stories at Het Veem Theater, in relation to the witness report I am writing and what to include in this account.

La memoria es una propiedad privada al que ning?n poder tine acceso (2) [Memory is a private property to which no power has access], Ryszard Kapuscinski (3) would answer in the imaginary conversation I envision between him and IVM. Kapuscinski has been at the centre of discussions in relation to ‘truth’, conveyed through his literary approach to journalism and reportage, and characterized by an expert observation and a focus on the ‘eyewitness’, all steeped in the colorful and poetic passion of the narrator and traveler. For both Kapuscinski and Valc?rcel Medina, who were born in the ‘30s and passed through the experience of war and dictatorship, private memory assumes a particular value, as the first and original property from which nothing but death can deprive us. I think it is precisely in this sense that the very idea of ’documentation’ and what it can represent in this world that is rich of meanings and devoid of absolute truth, assumes an ambiguous significance. Memory and imagination, in this broader sense, inevitably are part of an approach to documentation and reportage, which does not pretend to beaseptic and ambitiously objective, but acknowledges the productive complexity of the contingency (in the philosophical use of the word) of appearances.

I didn’t know much about the work of Isidoro Valc?rcel Medina, and going through a myriad of English press releases of different origins, I observe that IVM is hardly known outside of Spanish speaking countries. IVM never liked to document his work and I wonder how much this – apart from language limitations – has played a role in his otherwise unjustified absence in major art history narrations.

Isidoro Valc?rcel Medina, I discover in the same myriad of press releases, is considered to be a conceptual artist. The coining of the term ‘conceptual artist’ makes me a bit sceptical because it loosely describes so many different artistic practices, and it does not fit with IVM’s art. But definitions and naming might always and inevitably be flattening.To name something is similar to the act of hanging a card with a name on an object. One can say that this is a preparation for the use of the word. But what does this prepare for? (4). This Wittgenstein quote is a favourite of mine that often comes to mind again. Could documentation be related to the act of naming? Is documenting an attempt to define and ultimately appropriate elusiveness?

The curatorial project by Bulegoa z/b and IVM, 18 pictures and 18 stories, is structured around the creation of an imaginative response by storytellers to IVM’s work Performance in Resistance. This work consists of photographs realized in Madrid in 2011, related to actions the artist carried out between 1965 and 1993.

Once I get to the theatre I am invited to look at the 18 images composing Performance in Resistance hung on the left and right walls of the stage, with the three photos selected by the narrators for their stories highlighted with spotlights, as the substance of the theatrical setting.

Realized on not—too—small—not—too—big—but—just—regular photographic paper and framed by a simple pass?—partout, the works appear to me as a critical parody on the obsessive celebration of the document in the last decade. Medina’s workPerformance in Resistance is not a re—enactment as it might initially appear to the viewer, who is guided by the titles that directly refer to his past actions and the captions written with a type—machine. In reality the work is not the documentation of an action, or the translation of something that happened in another medium and another time, but a simulacre, the representation of non—documentation. IVM questions through this work not only the notion of authenticity and so the nature of the experience and encounter of art, but the notions of history, of proof, of document, of narration.

Don’t forget to forget. An exercise of forgetting in 10 acts is the title of the first story by Moosje Goosen, based on IVM’s work Campa?a 1969. The artist created flyers and gave them out to passers—by in Madrid and Murcia in 1969, to play with the double—meaning of words, and to perform through the restrictions and conditions, that Franco’s dictatorship entailed. Goosen’s voice is low, calm, seductively shy, in the middle of an almost empty stage. I imagine her as Sheherazadade, the protagonist from One Thousand and One Night who saves her life through narrating and imagining tales, whom Goosen herself recalls. Her rendering of the story is associative, like mental images that grow, one from the other. From Medina’s action to a diseased brain, from a fragment to an amputation, from an illness to power, from acting to believing, from deification to fiction, from history to erasure, from forgetting back to the action. As in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, IVM’s work in Goosen’s fictional yet factual story becomes the origin and the end of a natural circle, in which every single element gives way to the next one, and then leads back to the beginning. The Uroboru, or Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, is the image I envision while listening to her story.

Como olvidar es malo, yo nunca olvido [Because forgetting is bad, I never forget], says Medina on the phone. His voice sounds like it is coming from a distant past, and gives an account of a scene that happened sometime far back in history. During the 18 pictures and 18 stories IVM is in fact not physically at the theatre, but available on the phone. Through this simple act, the public is reminded of his Conversaciones Telef?nicas from the ’70s.

Esteban Pujals Gesal? is the second storyteller. The image he selected is Asunci?n, relating to the action performed by IVM in 1976 in the homonymous city in Paraguay. The artist’s action consisted of delineating a flat area on the map of the city, and then drawing up a set of rules that he would follow strictly in that tract of land, as Pujals Gesal? clearly explains. 136 blocks were marked on the map and in each one IVMwould start a conversation with passers-by. His experience of the encounters was written down in his notebook, and the questioning about the evidence of truth these may represent is the topic entailed.

Tiene la concha como una canoa [She has as a pussy as big as a canoe!] it sounds loudly in the theatre, followed by inevitable laughter in the firm and convivial voice of the storyteller Pujals Gesal?. These were the words of a prostitute, found written down in the artist’s notebook. Pujals Gesal? identifies the figure of a whore as the key element linking IVM’s action Asunci?n in 1976 and the related photograph taken in Madrid in 2011. He proposes this figure as the recurrence and the tie between past and (almost) present, and also between ‘real’ life and art. Prostitute and artist, what is the connection? Pujals Gesal? asks IVM on the phone. Yo ofro una mercanzia y ella ofre otra. Pero los dos se meritan de reciter algo [I offer some goods and she offers others. But both of us deserve to receive something]. Valc?rcel Medina’s words resonate minimally like the oracle of a sibyl, through an astonishing, yet incredibly profound and nuanced, simplicity.

For Emilio Moreno’s story we have to stand up and enter the lower stage. The lights are turned down except for a central theatrical light, just above Moreno himself. A number of paper sheets are scattered on the floor around him. From the overhead speakers a recording of his voice starts playing. We have to follow his instructions. We form a circle just around him. It is hard to focus on his words, because standing makes listening more arduous, and concentration is constantly seduced elsewhere by other elements, such as Moreno’s solemn movements under the dramatic light, or the words written on the sheets. Family, liberty, self, evertrust, open… It reminds me of Italian visual and concrete poetry of the sixties and seventies. The photograph from Performance in Resistance that is chosen by Moreno, I believe not by chance, refers in fact to a performance IVM realized for Milanopoesia, an international festival on the relation between poetry and other arts. Pronouncing those words in that moment is its reason to exist is the phrase that keeps surfacing in my mind. But now I doubt, and ask myself, if this phrase was really spoken, or if my memory is just constructing its existence. And I wonder if this could have been the ultimate goal of Moreno himself; to re—-create the friction between the ephemeral nature of the act and the ambiguous temporality, and reality, of memory.

By touching old works, how can you not mess them up in some way, and as an inevitable consequence, create new work? affirmed IVM in an interview (5). (…) Descriptions of Kapuscinski (no, his reactions) do what only art can do: give wings to our imagination(6), wrote Salman Rushdie. And that is exactly what I think while meditating, and writing about, IVM and this project.

Antonia Alampi
Antonia Alampi is a curator and art historian, co-director of the non-profit association Opera Rebis and member of The Black Swan curatorial collective. She is currently a participant of the Appel Curatorial Programme 2011/2012.

1 From an interview with Isidoro Valc?rcel Medina in Revista Sin t?tulo, n.1, Centro de Creaci?n Experimental, Universidad Castilla La Mancha, 1994.
2 Quote taken from Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book El Sha o la desmesura del poder, Barcelona: Anagrama, 2001. And I quote it in Spanish because, let’s call it coincidence, it’s in Spanish that I read it.
3 Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932—2007) was a Polish journalist and writer. He became famous worldwide for his war reports from countries in Asia, Africa and Europe, and for his books on the fall of Haile Selassie and Mohammad Reza Phlevi.
?4 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Par. 26., Blackwell Publishing, 1953 – 2001.
5 Jos? D?az Cuv?s and Nuria Enguita Mayo, Valc?rcel Medina Speaks Out, in Ir y venir de Valc?rcel Medina, Fundaci? Antoni T?pies, 2002, p.237.
6 Zygmunt Bauman, Affaire Kapuscinski, L’Espresso, 12th March 2010.