Let’s Face the Music Together: Softness Moves Mountains

Agnès Wyler transforms the nine members of the Barbapapa family into ten hand-sculpted ceramic figures – one for each character, and an additional figure that offers a quiet presence, open to interpretation. Each figure is paired with a ceramic scene named after actual playgrounds from around the world – abstract imaginaries shaped by the resonance of their titles rather than by their physical forms. Blending pop iconography with tactile practice, the exhibition reflects on memory, form, and the porous boundary between imagination and the built environment.

Originally conceived in the 1970s by Annette Tison and Talus Taylor, the Barbapapas exemplified adaptability and emotional fluidity. As notions of family shift toward more flexible forms, they resonate with renewed relevance – offering a vision of resilient, empathetic kinship that continues to challenge and expand conventional boundaries. Problem solvers and lifesavers at their core, they embodied the creativity and care needed to navigate and transform difficulty – an ever-relevant model in today’s complex world.

In channeling this spirit, Wyler translates their adaptable ethos into ceramic form – grounding their mutability in a medium historically tied to domesticity and care, and increasingly reclaimed as a space for resistance and embodied knowledge.

Barbapapa (pink) – Soft Monument to Hospitality
Swathed in pink, Barbapapa distills the radical possibility of welcome – not as submission, but as architecture. His stillness is not an end, but a beginning: an offering of form to whatever might come, tender and immense.

Barbamama (black) – Matriarch of Silent Revolutions
Draped in a velvet black, Barbamama inhabits the patient insurgency of care. Hers is a resistance shaped not through rupture but through rootedness – a persistence that nourishes futures invisible to the impatient eye.

Barbabelle (purple) – Allegory of Vulnerable Beauty
Bathed in purple, Barbabelle carries the risk of beauty – the courage to shimmer despite precarity. In her, aesthetics are not surface but fracture: the sensitive membrane where the world leaves its wounds.

Barbazoo (yellow) – Custodian of Fragile Ecologies
Radiant in yellow, Barbazoo traces the luminous filaments between beings. His posture is neither dominance nor retreat, but an ethics of relation – a yellowing memory of a world not yet abandoned.

Barbabeau (black, shaggy) – Ferality of Gesture
Encased in wild, black matter, Barbabeau embodies creation as a refusal of clarity. His texture – coarse, insurgent – suggests that not all form must seek polish; some must remain feral, unfinished, alive.

Barbalala (green) – Resonance in Suspension
Draped in green, Barbalala vibrates at the threshold of audibility. Her presence is an oscillation rather than a statement – a chromatic invitation to inhabit intervals, to listen where sound almost disappears.

Barbabright (blue) – Speculator of Other Worlds
Veiled in blue, Barbabright peers beyond the edge of the known. His inquiry is not conquest but contemplation: a blue of vastness, of invisible architectures slowly emerging through doubt.

Barbalib (orange) – Archivist of Mutable Knowledge
Orange-lit, Barbalib gathers and disperses knowledge like breath. In her, memory is porous, iterative – a scaffolding that trembles between erosion and endurance.

Barbabravo (red) – Atlas of Gentle Fortitude
Blazing in red, Barbabravo holds the paradox of resilience: a force without violence, an endurance without conquest. His form is a compact refusal to yield to brittleness – a soft, quiet axis around which others might turn.

Barbavolt (orange 2) – Conductor of Charged Transitions
Orange-lit, Barbavolt hums with restless energy. In him, movement is instinct – an oscillation between emergence and collapse, where intensity becomes architecture.