The exhibition “Una mirada que lo abarca todo” (A Gaze That Encompasses Everything), by Angyvir Padilla, features works developed following her show at FRAC Dunkirk, and inspired by a mountain legend from her childhood in Venezuela.
According to to Venezuelan legends, the city of Caracas was once surrounded by flat land where the sky met the sea. But one day, offended by the disrespect of local tribes, the sea goddess summoned a colossal wave to flood the region. Just before its impact, compassion overtook her. Instead of unleashing destruction, she transformed the wave into a protective mountain range—the Cordillera de la Costa—that now encircles Caracas.
While staying in Northern France, Padilla sought an “equivalent” mountain: a landscape form that could resonate within a European context as her mythical Venezuelan mountain did. She found it in the mining regions, where terrils—artificial hills formed from mining debris—punctuate the terrain. Though man-made, these conical formations carry the gravitas of natural monuments: mute witnesses to human industry and time.
In her video piece La Ola Que Vino De Lejos (The Wave That Came From Afar), Padilla ascends one such terril in a Sisyphean act to place a black trampoline on its peak. Once at the top, she bounces beneath the open sky, gazing toward a distant terril, silently communicating with the elements. The inverted shape of the mountain, echoed in the trampoline’s form, evokes a subterranean presence—an echo from the earth’s depths.
Scattered throughout the space are Padilla’s digitally reconstructed ceramic stones and photographs taken from her travels. With attention to the tension between natural and artificial, living and inert, near and far, she constructs a landscape grounded in her experience of displacement. Through sound, materiality, and rhythm, her work assumes a symbolic, imaginary, and metaphysical character.
Upstairs, she revisits a 2018 piece: The Blue of Distance. In response to the installation below, a blue elastic trampoline—evoking the sky—is stretched downwards by the weight of stones and a hardened plaster mass. A video projection reveals the slow transformation of these materials, forming a consuming “blue-hole,” accompanied by a soundscape of cosmic reflections—astral bodies, physics, and poetry—exploring the forces of gravity and time.
This exhibition is organised on the occasion of the Marion De Canniere Prize 2025.
The jury – consisting of all artists represented by FRED&FERRY – unanimously chose Angyvir Padilla for her clear, sincere, and unmistakably unique voice.
