Reconsolidation | Isabel Pérez del Pulgar
Written by Nicole Miller
Isabel Pérez del Pulgar reinterprets her family archive in Reconsolidation, a multidisciplinary visual arts project with a concentration on photographic medium. This autobiographical exhibition challenges our notions of memory and narrative, as Pulgar proves herself capable of restructuring past traumatic events. Rather than eliminate the triggers altogether, she transforms the photographs into powerful tools that advance her healing process. Her seemingly innocuous album, containing images of her married life from the 1980s and 1990s, are reappropriated to reveal the violence endured behind the scenes. She employs scissors, jars, burnt images, hallucinated albums, opaque mirrors, and uninhabited clothes to symbolically convey an imbalance of power on a personal level that urges the audience to examine the pervasiveness of male domination on a larger scale.
Photographs are the weapons Isabel possesses to confront her distressing narrative. To convert her uneasiness into empowerment, she drew inspiration from Reconsolidation Therapy, a medical treatment for post-traumatic stress that assists a patient in processing and re-evaluating a traumatic memory. Isabel channels this procedure into her art, superimposing videos and images, replaying a memory through a new narrative that serves to productively address her grief in a creative, liberating format. She explores her feelings of, “confinement, dejection, boredom, expectation, dread and disgust,” exposing the once invisible lies and fractures, helping her to reclaim her voice and identity.
Isabel sets the stage in a domestic manner, ironically placing the reinvented images back into traditional memory devices, such as the album, frames, and photo sleeves. She demonstrates how her alternative narrative should be perceived - in an ordinary, intimate setting, which evokes a sense of confusion and anxiety, as the traumatic memories are encased in conventionally positive forms of display. This layout creates an unsettling atmosphere that highlights the misconceptions and deficiencies of those presentations, challenging our immediate, superficial judgments on how we believe one’s life to be based on their outward appearance.
The original images above depict a supposedly happy couple on a trip to a beautiful city and a romantic moment shared between two people in love. They represent pictures of everyday life full of security and contentment. Isabel says, “You see how happy we were, how I protected you, how we loved each other, how lucky you were that I took you to the ends of the earth, that I gave you that dog, that the house was beautiful. you see how kind and generous I was…” However, the husband’s identity is deliberately masked, a key part of her healing ritual, as she makes the once inconspicuous truths of the relationship visible. Much of the reappropriation involves direct manual work on the original prints, emphasizing Isabel’s pain through an attack on the object itself, a vulnerable act of rebellion that terminates oppression and permits grace and freedom. Although his face and figure is shielded, his presence is magnified. Isabel does not simply remove him, but reworks the images to revolutionize her nightmares into sources of artistic ingenuity with touches of hopefulness. Through Isabel’s reconsolidation process she denounces the undermining of women in socioeconomic spaces and defies patriarchal intimidation and violence.
