When we approached Isidoro Valcárcel Medina in September 2010 with the proposal to take part together with Bulegoa z/b in If I Can’t Dances’s Performance in Residence programme, as we already knew, he made clear his reluctance to the idea of going back to some of his works from the past. He quickly responded to the invitation with a proposal for a new work: Performance in Resistance, which If I Can’t Dance produced in 2011, and which will be presented publically in winter 2012 as part of a curatorial project developed by Bulegoa z/b.

The work Performance in Resistance, made by IVM as a contribution to Performance in Residence, comprises 18 photographs taken in Madrid during Easter festival of 2011 (Wednesday April 20 to Monday April 25). Each photograph is mounted on passe-partout. On the paper frame some information on the photograph (title, date, city) appears type-written. On a closer look at the bits of information, it transpires that the 18 photographs refer to 18 different actions performed by Isidoro Valcárcel Medina in different cities between 1965 and 1993.

During the more than four decades that IVM has been active as an artist, many people have approached his work from different angles. Many have written profusely and in depth about it. Invariably, they have always found the same thing because, funnily enough, although insistent, IVM’s work is also profoundly elusive.

Some months ago we found ourselves with the research project of Performance in Residence on our hands. IVM had already given us, Bulegoa z/b, some material to research and focus on. We attempted to begin the research by looking for information on the 18 performances photographed in Performance in Resistance. What we found was that detailed information on the performances was already registered in the catalogue raisonné of his oeuvre Ir y Venir. Given the question, “how could our research be of some interest to us and other people?”, we decided to go back to IVM’s practice, our object of study, looking for inspiration:

“Imagination hides a wealth which drives the world. It is not so much an artistic matter as it is evolutionary. Fantasy, on the other hand, tends to be infertile or folklorically productive, that’s to say, it is useless for evolution.” 1

Bulegoa z/b proposes to present Performance in Resistance through a curatorial project titled 18 Pictures and 18 Stories. What this project proposes is to create a storytelling device that produces stories out of each of the 18 photographs of PiR. Those 18 photographs will be taken as ‘case studies’ or, taking IVM’s definition of what an artwork is, ‘examples’, ‘verbigracia’.

Many of IVM’s works, among them, Performance in Resistance, are evidence of transforming and reactivating the capacity of research as imaginative practice. In 18 Pictures and 18 Stories we try to embark on research understood as an ‘imaginative practice’. Another feature of IVM’s practice also underlying PiR is a coherent and rigorous methodology guided by the principle of “exploiting and exhausting the possibilities of the subject up to their logical conclusion”.

There are never hidden intentions in IVM’s work; everything is exposed and put on view. His aim regarding Peformance in Resistance is stated in the definition he gave of the term ‘Resistance’, in Bulegoa z/b’s Glossary he collaborated on in November 2011:

“(…) In our case (and in my opinion), obstinacy of the performance which does not want to stay in its place and time. And at the same time, an opportunity for us to fight against it with its own weapons. I even dare to say: against a conservative resistance there is a refreshing insistence. (…)”

IVM answer with PiR is that of a contemporary artist, someone who, as he says, has to respond to “the historical moment” . As he usually does in his work, he uses material from the past, trying to answer the question of ‘How to handle old pieces while creating a new piece of work’. Rather than taking the approach of ‘conservative resistance’, he offers ‘a refreshing insistence’.

August, 2011
Bulegoa z/b, Miren Jaio, Isabel de Naverán, Leire Vergara and Beatriz Cavia

1 Isidoro Valcárcel Medina in the catalogue of Ir y Venir, Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies; Murcia: Comunidad Autónoma de la Región de Murcia, Dirección de Proyectos e Iniciativas Culturales; Granada: Centro José Guerrero de la Diputación de Granada, 2002-2003.