In Agnès Varda’s farewell to filmmaking, she declares that ‘’if we opened people up, we’d find landscapes’’. Be it the whirling pool of ocean waters, the sculpture of a wing enclosed in ice, the mellow figure of a tree covered in snow or the imponent silhouette of a black mountain, Ángeles Peña allows us to glimpse into her soul and land through her suggestive photography.
Always inspired by the sublime power of nature, the photographer grew up amongst the Patagonia mountains, bearing witness and documenting the variegated character of such landscapes. By exploring the textures, patterns and inhabitants that represent the skin of this environment, she is able to capture in single instants the forces that are constantly moulting and conditioning our land, as well as the intimate relationships between these objects and their contexts. Her photography seems to challenge the motionless measurements of time and space, as it reflects the busting energy of hot springs, the passing of seasons, the misty songs of the sea meeting the coast and the melting mountain waters.
By recording this relentless and inevitable transformation, Ángeles Peña portrays nature as a new born, alternative vision of what has been surpassed through these rituals of passage: in her words, ‘’cold, water and ice are inexhaustible objects of study’’ as they are constantly transforming from one instant to the next and never preserve the same shape, pattern or form. Her project aims to represent not the landscape, wild and hostile in the eyes of man, but the path that humanity must walk to understand its insignificant role in perspective to the whole. Through her powerful landscapes, she intends to communicate how everything belongs to the rest, and to blow away their dichotomous nature by sewing together the sea and the sand, the piece and the place, the eye and the land.
“I don’t photograph a landscape, but all of what happens in it. The path, the road taken in its interior. I try to speak from within the landscape, not from a distance.” Ángeles Peña
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Photography: Ángeles Peña
Poetry: Erin Rizzato Devlin
AGUAS DE MONTAÑA / MOUNTAIN WATER
At the bottom of the universe,
lies a rock placed
at the opening of
two lustrous edges,
brushed with black ashes
and an intense azurine core,
an ice wound
by the breast of the earth.
Open to the skies,
a crater of water levigates
its circular pond
through crystal grounds,
carving its cavity
with irreversible calm.
As a mess of stars,
falling from the night
depositing as stones
arising as a vapor fog
foaming as white waves:
shapeless unity
inhabits the black body
of a mountain, streaked
by the timid course of waters,
meeting, shifting,
unfurling, pouring, roaring,
singing, whirling.
An island of ice stems
the sea, it is all
that is left.
LAPONIA / LAPLAND
Small bodies of white unfurl
awakening from their slumber:
tender and gentle
figures and bodies lay tired
in their pallid stature.
Dawn shakes their sleepy heads
of snow, as they rise
in the gleaming sunshine,
slowly melting their candid cloak
slowly growing their ancient trunk.
TIERRA VOLCÁNICA / VOLCANIC EARTH
A mist arises
as the hot breath
of the air,
as the fumes
of sacred prayer,
as the fog
of transcendence,
as the streams
of crying water,
as the smoke
of black earth.
The darkness
beneath the skin
of firm magma
appears as
puddles of ink,
igneous
and blackened
by the passage
of fire.
Ancient wrath
is formed
at the heart
of the stone,
its ashen origin
at the eruption
of light.
PAISAJE DICOTÓMICO / DICHOTOMOUS LANDSCAPE
A fine thread is pulled
between the two as one.
The presence of borders fortifies
the faint illusion of identity:
the sea pulls at the sand,
as a child tugging its mother;
the black body of a mountain
stands as a holy idol against
a background of white;
the scar of the land limits water,
as the abrasion of soft skin
made of openings and closure.
A fine thread is pulled
between the two as one.
Photo Credit: Angeles Peña
