Affordable Consolations by Rebeca Ulici is an exhibition that invites us to read it like a letter, while the person we feel safest with braids our hair and tells us about their day.
Rebeca Ulici uses her practice to understand herself and revisit the traumas of the past, trying each time to find a way forward. Her works often emerge in series. She begins with a feeling or an experience that she tries to give form to, then returns to it repeatedly until she can understand it, work through it and, eventually, feel that it has come to an end.
One of the subjects Rebeca explores most deeply is the dysfunctional environment. She examines it, takes it apart and tries to understand what happened and how she can move forward. In this process, art has become a form of therapy, a way of giving shape to experiences that are sometimes difficult to put into words. In Affordable Consolations, the artist approaches death through different ways of experiencing and understanding loss.
One of the works stems from a deeply personal experience, an obsession with child anatomy and the premature loss of two nephews. Each module of the installation becomes a form of mourning, while their repetition reflects an attempt to give direction to emotions and find a place where they can exist. The work speaks of pain, but also of a profound attachment to life and love, even in the presence of death.
The second subject explored in the exhibition stems from Rebeca’s mother’s death and unfolds through gestures of tenderness as well as extreme suffering. Here, grief exists somewhere between gentleness and pain, between the small gestures through which love continues to exist and an absence that nothing can repair. The work allows these two states to coexist without attempting to separate them.
Perhaps what we can take away from Rebeca’s works is the understanding that there is no single way to grieve. Each of us finds a different way to move through loss, to keep someone close and to make sense of absence. What remains are moments, gestures, bodies, places and conversations that continue to carry weight long after the person or the moment has disappeared. Every memory can hold its own power. Rebeca reminds us that there is no single way to keep someone alive in our memory, nor is there only one way to live with absence.
