Reconsolidation is an exhibition of combat and exorcism whose core is the author’s family album, Isabel Perez del Pulgar. Conceived as an art and multidisciplinary project, this exhibition addresses the question of male domination from an intimate archive.
Isabel presents here a domestic universe traversed by power games: scissors, jars, burnt images, hallucinated albums, opaque mirrors, uninhabited clothes. In little rosy and neat-looking stagings, she replays confinement, dejection, boredom, expectation, dread and disgust. The violence suffered is ambivalent: oscillating between threats and seductions, closed doors and derisory gifts. Bank receipts invite themselves into the albums, witnesses of humiliating alms given over the months with obsessive avarice.
Revisiting an archive of conjugal life, uncomfortable because false, she speaks of the lack of memory in the piercings of the image, the violence in the scratches, the doubt in the cracks, the self-effacement in the bloody colorimetric variations, the liberation by burning, the melancholy in the ashes remaining under the glass of the frame. She goes further by turning the images upside down, to show the behind the scenes of the decor: the unsaid and the vanity of the myth that the marital album claims to produce.
Ironically, Isabel puts the images thus reappropriated back into the conventional devices of memory: the album, the frame, the photo sleeves. She thus shows the flaws of these memory devices, circumvents them, escapes from the inside, without breaking into them. She also reveals the deadly background and pushes this art of conservation to its most petrifying expression, the formalin jar which collects the last remains of its sorceries, disturbing residues that are almost shamanic … sign of death warrant to sender.
This project has a participatory and sisterly component. Isabel invited other women artists to send their testimonies, literary or iconic, of threats or attacks that they themselves may have suffered or of feelings of guilt or confinement that they may have experienced.
All of these elements build a cathartic work whose challenge is to put personal history back into motion, to reconstruct a living and free memory.
Internationally recognized for her work as a videographer, Isabel Perez del Pulgar invests here the photographic medium and opens a new line of work around still images.
Isabel Perez del Pulgar : Reconsolidation
From July 21 to August 26
Larvoratoire photographique
20 rue Anatole France
29100 Douarnenez
From Tuesday to Saturday
11 a.m.-1 p.m. and 4 p.m.-7 p.m.
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