Through images, objects, gestures, voice, and spatial installations, she explores how memory and displacement alter the places we inhabit and remember. Exchanges with family and friends across distance sometimes become part of how the work is made.
You often return to the idea of home as a space that’s both familiar and uncanny, impossible to capture in a single image or phrase. You use different media: sculpture, performance, photo, video, and sound. Tell us more about the transmediality of your process.
I don’t usually begin by choosing a medium. Regularly, something returns: a memory, an image, a story, and with it an emotion connected to displacement. I stay with it, not knowing what it will become until it begins to connect with a material, a gesture, a voice, or a space.
For me, home already contains both familiarity and unease. Something familiar can become uncomfortable precisely because we know it so intimately, while something strange can also feel unexpectedly familiar. Home is never completely comfortable or completely unreachable. It is porous, changing with us and over time. This is why it returns through fragments of different rooms, places, people, and smells, each one becoming part of a continuing attempt to construct it again and again. A work rarely develops alone. A particular emotional state can open an entire constellation of ideas, and several forms begin to grow around it in parallel. Some become autonomous works; others remain experiments or unfinished gestures in the studio, suspended until they return in another context. I tend to think through sculpture and material processes. I understand an image or a memory through what matter can do to it. I am drawn to materials that transform and sometimes degrade through the process: plaster cracks, wax melts, clay dries; bodies, gravity, and time make them different from what they were at the beginning. An image may leave the photograph and become the surface of an object; another idea may need to occupy a room, become a video, or be carried by a body.
Sound has entered this universe more recently, but I also approach it through its materiality. A voice changes the atmosphere and the way people inhabit sculptural elements, making them feel like presences or ghosts. Even my voice, once it is outside of me, becomes almost unrecognizable. It turns into an emotional texture that appears and disappears, leaving something intangible that the public may carry with them as a feeling or sensation.
Transmediality is not about translating the same practice into different media. It is about allowing an emotional universe to generate a constellation of forms, each with its materiality and temporality.
Your work is driven by a persistent desire to inhabit what may no longer exist, paired with knowing you can’t fully get there. Does that tension frustrate you, or is the reaching itself what the work is actually about?
Distance is only one part of what makes a familiar memory become strange. Time has passed, I have grown older, and adapting to another place has changed how I understand where I come from, who I was, and what it means to be Venezuelan from outside Venezuela. I feel a longing for a place, but also for an earlier version of myself, from when I still lived there. I think the attempt to reach for something that no longer exists is what drives my work.
Venezuela has gone through so many difficult social, political, and economic transformations that, even if I returned, I could never return to the same country. The place has changed without me, and I have changed away from it. There is pain in that double transformation, especially because my entire family and some friends are still there, and I experience what happens from a distance. Those emotions fuel my work constantly. I approach images, objects, and domestic spaces hoping to recover fragments of home, but what I construct often remains diffuse, opaque, and sometimes almost unrecognizable. In Venezuela, I experienced its instability from within. Migration did not make it disappear; it changed how I understand my identity and intensified that feeling of instability. From abroad, I keep asking who I was there, who I have become, how the places I have left continue without me, and how I continue without them while searching for new places where I might belong. Living away has also shown me that these feelings, although rooted in my history, are not limited to diasporic experience. People can feel estranged from home without leaving it, as their cities, landscapes, and political realities change around them. I think it is becoming increasingly difficult to feel at home in the world today.
What techniques did you use in the work Home Unfoldable Home? How did it translate into the space?
Home Unfoldable Home began as a conversation across distance. I asked my mother to use a point-and-shoot camera to photograph her favourite places in the Caracas apartment where I grew up and where she still lives. What she chose to show was entirely hers. I wanted to see the space through the eyes of the person who continues to inhabit it.
I wanted to print the photographs on fabric and cover them with wax but needed the images to remain alive beneath so much paraffin. After testing several techniques, I decided on screen printing because its colors remained vivid through the layers. I make the pieces on site: I submerge the printed fabric in melted paraffin and, while it is still warm, drape it over simple steel structures, adding layers of wax as it dries.
The more I try to preserve the image, the more I conceal it. Rooms and objects dissolve into translucent stains, colors, shadows, and textures. I bring the apartment closer by partially erasing it. Some structures extend from the walls; others stand in the room, allowing people to encounter both sides. They do not reconstruct the apartment but give a temporary body to its fragments. The hanging fabrics recall domestic gestures: clothes left to dry, removing a jacket when arriving home, undressing once you feel comfortable. But the fabric has hardened, and the body is absent. The apartment returns intimate but remote, preserved and disappearing at the same time.
The particularly interesting work is Virgy’s Boutique. How did you come to the idea of making garments in plaster, and how did you use them in the performance context?
Virgy’s Boutique began with photographs I took almost twenty years ago inside my mother’s apartment in Caracas, before I could imagine becoming an artist. She has long sold women’s clothes from a small, informal shop at the back of her kitchen. The people who came were always women: some were family or friends; others came so regularly that they became familiar strangers. I photographed the domestic corners filled with clothes and the people close to us: my mother, myself, relatives, and friends. Growing up, women undressing in the living room over coffee, laughter, and gossip was completely normal to me. That female community brought warmth into a home that was intimate but never entirely private. Looking at the images years later from Brussels, I saw my mother and the women I had grown up around. She raised my brother and me on her own, supported us through this shop, and continues selling clothes despite increasingly difficult conditions in Venezuela. I have always looked up to her strength. Looking at these images now, though, I also think about what it means to be a woman in circumstances where so much resilience is expected of us.
The plaster garments came later. I collected women’s clothing from the 1980s, especially blazers and power-suit silhouettes, because they recalled how my mother dressed and occupied space. Covering the garments in plaster stopped their usual movement and flexibility, turning them into rigid sculptural objects, almost as if I could hold the memories attached to them in place. I then transferred the photographs I had taken onto the uneven plaster surfaces, where they lose their clarity and turn into colors, marks, and textures, almost like crayon drawings. On the trousers and blazer used in the performance, a portrait of my mother in her shop is fragmented between the two pieces. On the day of the opening, the garments hang like clothes on a washing line. For the performance, I begin by humming and singing Contigo en la distancia, a bolero my grandparents sang to each other at home. Then I take down the trousers; my voice stops, and another sound takes over. Sitting on the floor, I put them on. Once they are on, I stand, take down the blazer, and put it on, trying to fit these rigid clothes around my body.
There is something in this gesture that recalls trying on clothes in my mother’s shop. I am wearing her portrait, but I am not trying to get her. It feels closer to entering that memory with my body, from another country and another moment, and to understanding my way of being a woman today while carrying her strength and resilience with me.
The hardened clothes make my body stiff, robotic, and trembling. The plaster breaks with a blunt sound, like a piñata cracking open; smaller pieces fall with the fragile sound of glass. What had been immobilized becomes flexible around my body again. Once I can move freely enough, I remove the clothes, throw them down, and leave. The altered garments and colorful fragments remain throughout the exhibition, the material traces and quiet afterlife of the action.
How have your experiences with residencies and mentoring programs influenced your practice over the last few years?
I think I keep returning to residencies because every arrival unsettles me. Leaving my routines and entering an unfamiliar studio forces me to search for home again. My practice seems to thrive in that first instability. Slowly, I learn to inhabit the room and make it mine; the disorientation begins to generate a new constellation of works or another line of thought.
The residency spaces I have been part of recently are all quite particular, and each one creates community differently: through sharing studios and everyday routines; sustained conversations; visits; or simply working beside people long enough to see how their ideas change. They bring me references, questions, and ways of working that I would not necessarily reach on my own, and they shift the ground beneath my feet in a good way. Each place opens a different portal, but also creates a temporary form of belonging.
Residencies also change what I am able to do in very concrete ways. Depending on the place, I can shift the scale of a work, try a material or technique I could not easily approach alone, or stay with one research question more intensely. Working with Moussem over a longer period meant moving through different communities and ways of collaborating and eventually led to the exchange with M Leuven, where I was able to focus on working with glass for the first time. Morpho offered a more collective rhythm centred on process, experimentation and exchange among artists, and gave me time to approach sound more deliberately.
At WIELS, I have had the time and focus to stay with voice, sound, and grief: to work, listen, write, and observe without forcing everything to resolve immediately. It has made me trust something that was taking shape: a presence, a voice, and very few elements can hold an entire situation. Sculpture remains my most instinctive language, but I no longer feel that a performance must begin by activating an object. A presence or a voice can create the situation on its own.
Mentoring has influenced me in a quieter but still strong way. Conversations with mentors, together with exchanges with other artists who share diasporic or minority experiences, have made me feel accompanied and helped me trust intuitions I had begun to follow. In some of these exchanges, I do not have to translate or explain everything before I can speak, and that feels like a breath of fresh air. Other conversations have helped me approach my practice with more maturity, or simply from another perspective. Perhaps I am constantly searching for places where I can feel accompanied and where that feeling can become another form of belonging.
Angyvir Padilla – www.angyvir.com, www.instagram.com/angyvirpadilla/
Angyvir Padilla’s (b. 1987, Caracas) work has been presented at M Museum Leuven (BE), Kunstverein Friedrichshafen (DE), IKOB Museum (BE), FOMU Antwerp (BE), S.M.A.K. Ghent (BE), FRAC Grand Large (FR), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (HR). She is currently an artist-in-residence at WIELS in Brussels.