18 pictures and 18 stories
“18 pictures and 18 stories”: third stop of “Performance in Resistance” by Isidoro Valcárcel Medina at Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona
by
18 pictures and 18 stories is a project of Bulegoa z/b, realized in collaboration with If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution of Amsterdam, that presents and accompanies Performance in Resistance by Isidoro Valcárcel Medina through 18 stories and on a journey to 6 cities.
In Autumn 2010, If I Can’t Dance invited Valcárcel Medina and Bulegoa z/b to take part in Performance in Residence, a program that studies and researches performances from the past from the perspective of current artistic practice, and that includes the participation of Flávio de Carvalho e Inti Guerrero, Guy de Cointet and Marie de Brugerolle, Matt Mullican and Vanessa Desclaux. Valcárcel Medina responded to the invitation with Performance in Resistance, 18 photographs mounted on passe-partout that show as many actions carried out by the artist in different cities between 1965 and 1993. The resulting set of images blurs the limits between the lived moment and the document, between what happened and fiction. Performance in Resistance also shows the guiding principle of Valcárcel Medina’s practice, his refusal to submit to the conventions of any institution or discipline, including the discipline of history. Such performative resistance arises from the artist’s conviction that his only material is his historical time, and that the imagination “hides a wealth which drives the world”.
18 pictures and 18 stories conceives investigation as an imaginative practice which can transform and reactivate its objects of study. The work takes the form of an itinerant framework which produces narratives. 18 people have been invited to take one of the 18 photographs that make up Performance in Resistance and propose a story. The first stop of this specifically-conceived work by Valcárcel Medina was the Hetveem Theater, Amsterdam, in February 2012. There, three narrators, Moosje Goosen, Emilio Moreno and Esteban Pujals Gesalí, told 3 stories based on 3 of the set of photographs: Campaña 1969 (Campaign 1969, Madrid, Murcia, 1969) S/T. Herramientas de Precisión (Untitled. Precision Tools, Milan, 1987) and 136 manzanas de Asunción (136 blocks of Asunción, Asunción, 1976). At the second stop at Bulegoa z/b, José Díaz Cuyás, Jaime Vallaure and Azucena Vieites told 3 stories based on Peón al Rey (King’s Pawn Game, Murcia, 1965), El discurso sigue… su curso (The discourse continues… its course, Granada, 1993) and Retratos callejeros (Street portraits, Barcelona, 1975). At the third stop at Fundació Tàpies in Barcelona Nuria Enguita Mayo, Aimar Pérez Galí and Manuel Martínez Ribas will tell 3 stories based on El cuadro (The Painting, Madrid, 1969), La Visita (The Visit, Various cities, 1974) and El Sena por París (The Seine Through Paris, Paris, 1975). After Amsterdam, Bilbao and Barcelona, Performance in Resistance will travel to CAC Bretigny, Bretigny, BNV Producciones, Seville, Playground Festival of STUK, Leuven and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Universidade de São Paulo. Each place will host 3 stories, making up a total of 18.
Nuria Enguita Mayo (Madrid 1967). She is co-editor of Afterall Journal and a member of the board of directors of arteypensamiento at the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía – UNIA, where she runs Narrativas de Fuga, a programme of seminars with artists, including Alice Creischer, Eduardo Molinari/Archivo Caminante and Pedro Costa. She is co-curator of the Encuentro Internacional de Medellín (MDE11), and is currently working on a retrospective exhibition of Luis Claramunt for MACBA/Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. She is cultural advisor for the Basque Government. In the last two years she has curated exhibitions of Eulàlia Valldosera and Ibon Aranberri at the MNCARS-Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.
From June 1998 to September 2008, she was chief curator at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies where she was responsible for exhibitions of Chris Marker, Renée Green, Eulàlia Valldosera, Victor Burgin, Asger Jorn, Sanja Ivekovic, Pedro G. Romero, Ibon Aranberri, Ana Maria Maiolino, Fernando Bryce and Steve McQueen among others, as well as seminars and film and video cycles. She has directed or taken part in projects at there such as Archive Cultures; Contemporay Arab Representations, co-curated with Catherine David, Tour-isms. The Defeat of Dissent and Urban Imaginaries from America Latina, directed by Armando Silva. She graduated in History and Art Theory at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 1991. From 1991 to 1998 she was curator at IVAM-Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia, with Vicente Todolí, where she was responsible for exhibitions of Cildo Meireles and Juan Downey, among many others. Her association with Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona began in 1996 with her work as joint-curator of the Lygia Clark exhibition (Travelling show to Marseille, Brussels, and Rio de Janeiro). In 1998 she curated the group exhibition Scattered Affinities in Apex, New York and Fundación Telefónica in Madrid, and selected a series of films and videos from the sixties and seventies for the Museu Serralves Collection. In 2002 she was a member of the curatorial team of Manifesta 4, Frankfurt. For the last twenty years she has been active in writing in several platforms as well as in lecturing in Spain and other Europe and Latin America, both in educational and museum contexts. She has directed seminars and other courses in universities on curating and other topics.
Aimar Pérez Galí (Barcelona, 1982). Aimar works in the field of dance and performing arts as a dancer, performer, pedagogue, maker and writer. Graduated by the High School of Arts of Amsterdam, he has worked in The Netherlands for a few years and currently he develops his professional career in Spain. His work moves through the research of the relations between dance, movement, pedagogy and the development of new process like approaches towards the performative practice. His last performance pieces include The Pandora Project, Declarando Amor and The Golden Variations. He collaborates and has collaborated with artists such as Xavier Le Roy, Nicole Beutler, Nora Heilmann, Andrea Boziç, David Zambrano and Silvia Sant Funk. He is currently a member of the collective Las Calaveras de Cher, co-responsible of Espacio Práctico and associated artist of La Poderosa.
Manuel Martínez Ribas (Barcelona, 1965). Manuel is a lawyer specialized in Intellectual Property and Information Technology law, and has broad experience, since 1991 when he co-founded his own legal practice, in legal transactions and litigation relating to copyright, computers, privacy and e-commerce issues, including electronic invoicing, DRMS, phishing, corporate governance liability, RFID, computer forensics and open source / free software. At national and international level, he has not only participated in various R+D projects, but also written and lectured extensively on all aspects of Intellectual Property and Information Technology legislation. He has been speaker in the 3rd International GPLv3 conference and, for 5 years, at the Internet Global Congress. He also has experience as a music performer.
18 pictures and 18 stories is co-produced by BNV Producciones, Seville; CAC Brétigny, Greater Paris; If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Amsterdam; the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP); Playground Festival in STUK/Museum M, Leuven; Tàpies Foundation, Barcelona; Tate Modern, London; and Het Veem Theater, Amsterdam.
The publication and the performances are realized with the support of Corpus: a network for performance practice financed by the European Union.
