18 pictures and 18 stories

18 pictures and 18 stories is a project by Bulegoa z/b, carried out in dialogue with If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution of Amsterdam. It presents and accompanies Performance in Resistance by Isidoro Valcárcel Medina in two different formats: via series of stages in seven cities in 2012, and in a book.

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. 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 set of images taken by Rocío Areán Gutiérrez 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 conceived investigation as an imaginative practice which can transform and reactivate its objects of study. The work took the form of an itinerant framework which produced narratives. In each of the seven stages, three people were invited to take one of the eighteen photographs that make up Performance in Resistance and propose a story. After the presentations at each stage, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina was available on the telephone to answer questions from the narrators or public.