Caterina Silva's Limbo Paintings
by Anna Cestelli Guidi, June 2022
“The Cruellest Month”: taken from the opening line of T.S. Eliot’s towering poem The Waste Land, the title of Caterina Silva’s exhibition clearly suggests that what unites this new cycle of works is the sense of a new beginning, much like the magical and stirring moment when nature reawakens every spring. The explosions of light and colour with which these paintings dazzle us recall the coruscating exuberance of the reborn natural world, but they are also the physical embodiment of the start of a new phase in the artist’s pictorial research.
Silva has left behind her the inky depths of an enigmatically darkened space, and it is now the colour white that unifies the grand airiness of these new works and floods it with light. From this whiteness, motile, organic forms emerge: watery algae, aery lianas, tendrils and flowers that intersect and chase after one another in thick clots and liquid fields of intense colour – pinks, reds, greens and sky blues, in all imaginable shades – merging and quivering in the space around them like disembodied flowers or a lustily erupting life force. Like vibrating explosions of sound, sparks of colour flare out from a still-inchoate primordial magma embodying a pre-linguistic stage of human development in which images and words contribute to a single cosmic totality. Worlds as yet undefined, limbos where everything is still potential, these primogenial amniotic fluids are painted onto the canvas with rapid brushstrokes, following no pre-imposed schema. A gestural expressiveness, born of the artist’s need to wrestle with the canvas and with her painting’s subject, in which we sense something dancelike, something happening in a state resembling a trance – that synchronicity of the spiritual and the corporeal, the divine and the human, intuition and rationality, in which the élan vital displays its unsettling side, its own intrinsic equivocalness.
As the poet writes, reawakenings bring with them the poignant melancholy of reminiscence, “mixing memories and desire,” and inevitable thoughts of death, “breeding lilacs out of the dead land”1. And so, for all their joyful lightness of touch and luminosity, the aether of these works resounds with echoes of a subliminal disquiet which is not just the artist’s own and which regards the disorienting times we live in, prompting reflections on our sense that ours is a fragmenting world – the natural world, but also our political and historical world – a world we seem to find ever harder to comprehend.
As beguiling as they are, Caterina Silva’s works are not naïf, nor is their charm superficial: the expressivity they exhibit is born of a rigorous thought process. The feeling of improvisation that Silva’s painting conveys is not casual: driven by both intuition and intellect, this is a profoundly conceptual artistic practice. There is, therefore, nothing accidental in her choice of a vertical format for these landscapes/cosmoses, which are slightly taller than a life-size human figure would be – a size that draws the surrounding space and the viewer into the work in a performative and radical way. There is also nothing accidental in the fact that Silva’s paintings are grouped in cycles of work, because it is only as interrelated parts of a whole that their characteristic interplay of assonances and repeated forms acquires real meaning, like the notes of a piece of music or the phonemes in a new alphabet. An essence which, in Silva’s case, again aims to deconstruct key elements of established pictorial and linguistic conventions: traditional perspectival figuration’s centre point, the focal point of the image, is now a void – a luminous vortex thanks to which, like the digital light of our iPhone screens, the entire picture plane vibrates with novel resonances; and the same is true of her mysterious ideograms, with their suggestions of a reintroduction, into the initially and metaphysically silent visual realm, of a pre-linguistic phônê (voice) which, as Adriana Cavarero writes in her illuminating book on the subject of the voice, emphasises “the sonorous, libidinal and pre-semantic physicality of the logos”2. The vibrating void and the quasi-aphonic sonority of Silva’s painting challenge the certitude of Western culture’s logos and the forms of power that derive from it. In an act of resistance, they give voice to the poetry and eroticism of the ineffable.
Modern-day Water Lilies, these works are reaffirmations of the artist’s faith in the language of painting. Indeed, the word “Fidelity” is written across – and provides the title for – one of the paintings in this show: it is an aggressive statement made in black spray paint, as if intended to convey the urgency of the artist’s need to declare her love of painting. And these works are also reaffirmations of her belief in painting’s power to provoke wonder and thus induce the suspension of disbelief that only art can bring about, setting in train a radical transformation of us, art’s viewers, and of the world around us.
In stark contrast with the “politically correct” artistic practices currently glutting the art market and art in general, Caterina Silva’s painting shares something of the utopian impulse of that equally nomadic and unconventional innovator, Alighiero Boetti: in other words, his “bringing the world into the world” (“mettere al mondo il mondo”), politically as well as aesthetically, offering glimpses of another possible reality, an alternative to the prevailing hegemonic idioms. Similarly, in these new works of hers, Caterina Silva brings into the world other worlds of possibility, and does so with a visionary intensity that only grace, in the moral sense, can confer. As Simone Weil notes in her diary written at one of the darkest points in recent history: “Not to exercise all the power at one’s disposal is to endure the void. This is contrary to all the laws of nature. Grace alone can do it” 3.
1 Adriana Cavarero, A più voci. Filosofia dell’espressione vocale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003)
2 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963)
3. Simone Weil, L’ombra e la grazia, Bompiani, 2017, p. 23.
by Anna Cestelli Guidi, June 2022
“The Cruellest Month”: taken from the opening line of T.S. Eliot’s towering poem The Waste Land, the title of Caterina Silva’s exhibition clearly suggests that what unites this new cycle of works is the sense of a new beginning, much like the magical and stirring moment when nature reawakens every spring. The explosions of light and colour with which these paintings dazzle us recall the coruscating exuberance of the reborn natural world, but they are also the physical embodiment of the start of a new phase in the artist’s pictorial research.
Silva has left behind her the inky depths of an enigmatically darkened space, and it is now the colour white that unifies the grand airiness of these new works and floods it with light. From this whiteness, motile, organic forms emerge: watery algae, aery lianas, tendrils and flowers that intersect and chase after one another in thick clots and liquid fields of intense colour – pinks, reds, greens and sky blues, in all imaginable shades – merging and quivering in the space around them like disembodied flowers or a lustily erupting life force. Like vibrating explosions of sound, sparks of colour flare out from a still-inchoate primordial magma embodying a pre-linguistic stage of human development in which images and words contribute to a single cosmic totality. Worlds as yet undefined, limbos where everything is still potential, these primogenial amniotic fluids are painted onto the canvas with rapid brushstrokes, following no pre-imposed schema. A gestural expressiveness, born of the artist’s need to wrestle with the canvas and with her painting’s subject, in which we sense something dancelike, something happening in a state resembling a trance – that synchronicity of the spiritual and the corporeal, the divine and the human, intuition and rationality, in which the élan vital displays its unsettling side, its own intrinsic equivocalness.
As the poet writes, reawakenings bring with them the poignant melancholy of reminiscence, “mixing memories and desire,” and inevitable thoughts of death, “breeding lilacs out of the dead land”1. And so, for all their joyful lightness of touch and luminosity, the aether of these works resounds with echoes of a subliminal disquiet which is not just the artist’s own and which regards the disorienting times we live in, prompting reflections on our sense that ours is a fragmenting world – the natural world, but also our political and historical world – a world we seem to find ever harder to comprehend.
As beguiling as they are, Caterina Silva’s works are not naïf, nor is their charm superficial: the expressivity they exhibit is born of a rigorous thought process. The feeling of improvisation that Silva’s painting conveys is not casual: driven by both intuition and intellect, this is a profoundly conceptual artistic practice. There is, therefore, nothing accidental in her choice of a vertical format for these landscapes/cosmoses, which are slightly taller than a life-size human figure would be – a size that draws the surrounding space and the viewer into the work in a performative and radical way. There is also nothing accidental in the fact that Silva’s paintings are grouped in cycles of work, because it is only as interrelated parts of a whole that their characteristic interplay of assonances and repeated forms acquires real meaning, like the notes of a piece of music or the phonemes in a new alphabet. An essence which, in Silva’s case, again aims to deconstruct key elements of established pictorial and linguistic conventions: traditional perspectival figuration’s centre point, the focal point of the image, is now a void – a luminous vortex thanks to which, like the digital light of our iPhone screens, the entire picture plane vibrates with novel resonances; and the same is true of her mysterious ideograms, with their suggestions of a reintroduction, into the initially and metaphysically silent visual realm, of a pre-linguistic phônê (voice) which, as Adriana Cavarero writes in her illuminating book on the subject of the voice, emphasises “the sonorous, libidinal and pre-semantic physicality of the logos”2. The vibrating void and the quasi-aphonic sonority of Silva’s painting challenge the certitude of Western culture’s logos and the forms of power that derive from it. In an act of resistance, they give voice to the poetry and eroticism of the ineffable.
Modern-day Water Lilies, these works are reaffirmations of the artist’s faith in the language of painting. Indeed, the word “Fidelity” is written across – and provides the title for – one of the paintings in this show: it is an aggressive statement made in black spray paint, as if intended to convey the urgency of the artist’s need to declare her love of painting. And these works are also reaffirmations of her belief in painting’s power to provoke wonder and thus induce the suspension of disbelief that only art can bring about, setting in train a radical transformation of us, art’s viewers, and of the world around us.
In stark contrast with the “politically correct” artistic practices currently glutting the art market and art in general, Caterina Silva’s painting shares something of the utopian impulse of that equally nomadic and unconventional innovator, Alighiero Boetti: in other words, his “bringing the world into the world” (“mettere al mondo il mondo”), politically as well as aesthetically, offering glimpses of another possible reality, an alternative to the prevailing hegemonic idioms. Similarly, in these new works of hers, Caterina Silva brings into the world other worlds of possibility, and does so with a visionary intensity that only grace, in the moral sense, can confer. As Simone Weil notes in her diary written at one of the darkest points in recent history: “Not to exercise all the power at one’s disposal is to endure the void. This is contrary to all the laws of nature. Grace alone can do it” 3.
1 Adriana Cavarero, A più voci. Filosofia dell’espressione vocale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003)
2 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963)
3. Simone Weil, L’ombra e la grazia, Bompiani, 2017, p. 23.
I wanted things that I couldn't at times articulate.
by Laura Smith, 2021
on Pink for flower, viaindustriae publishing, English/Italian ISBN 9788897753773
I wanted things that I couldn't at times articulate.
Helen Frankenthaler
Composed of an evolving alphabet of distinctive, nonfigurative forms, Caterina Silva’s paintings explode the structures of power that exist between language and authority, meaning and control. Through her abstracted and highly gestural brushwork she creates and explores the potential of non-codifiable and non-cooptable means of communication. In so doing, her works demonstrate how language and authority are intricately connected and constructed, and as such, latently dismantle-able.
The forms within Silva’s paintings and performances also reflect on the canon of art history as an authored and authorised narrative, which for a long time barred the work of women. Her works call to mind those paintings and painters that had been excluded, they shimmer with the energies of Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Carol Rama, Etel Adnan, Hilma af Klint, Joan Mitchell and many others, assimilating an array of historical references that have been – and continue to be – inspirational. These influences are combined with Silva’s personal memories, mythologies, and activist politics. What results is an entirely new corpus of glyphs and ciphers that tell a new story, one that is outside of the existing constructs of everyday language and simultaneously capable of incorporating the very histories that it has excluded. This endeavor finds resonance with the words of Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous in The Newly Born Woman: ‘there is a voice crying in the wilderness – the voice of a body dancing, laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it? The voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood.’
You have mystery service ahead, and you will soon enough realise what is expected of you.
Hilma af Klint
Of her work, Silva comments that she is interested in ‘what escapes language and its classification and control systems,’ she seeks to emphasise the feelings of powerlessness and discomfort that being outside of language generate, in order to ‘investigate the relationship between power and language and to question the violence of representation from a silent and non-discursive perspective.’ This has led her to develop her alphabet of gestures and forms that doesn’t have a clear and rational translation but allows her to create paintings that are open and available to the interpretation of the observer. She wants to find ways of using language in a non-appropriating way, receptive to endless interpretation and evolution. Such a (mis)use of the system of language is significant when thinking about Silva’s work from a feminist perspective, as Julia Kristeva comment: ‘to use language is to use a masculine system—and that means that in using language, women are always making a compromise of their own subjectivity.’ Through her production of an alternative and highly personal language, Silva therefore disrupts the authority of masculine language and refuses to compromise her own subjectivity.
The body of works titled Impressioni (2018) all reflect the intuitive processes through which Silva absorbs and articulates her surroundings (physical, emotional and historical) as data without a clear code. In this series, Silva translates her observations, feelings and reactions to certain places, times and daily routines into a set of gestural strokes. The paintings incorporate pigments, oil paint, spray-paint and ink, alongside dust, soil, roasted barley, turmeric, curcuma, liquorice, soap and other organic materials that she happened have around her; their brushstrokes escape identifiable language – and its definitions and hierarchies – and as such the works create a non-cooptable and highly feminist system that is unable to be pinned down.
A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.
Elaine de Kooning
In addition to her painting, another aspect of Silva’s artistic practice is her work with performance. For her the two mediums are not distinct but intricately and importantly connected. Performance offers a means for Silva to detach the act of painting from the processes of production, the materiality of the art object and the implications of the market. Her performances deliberately use the gestures – or alphabet – of her paintings, but without the paint and in somebody else’s hands. As she comments: ‘the gestures in both my in-studio [painting] process and during live events are at the same time spontaneous and hyper-mediated. In both cases controlled chance plays a role.’ Her performances generally employ a range of participants, each given five or so actions that represent translations of her painting process into bodily movements. The performers are free to reinterpret these actions according to their physical and imaginative possibilities. Rehearsals are generally kept to a minimum to encourage improvisation and spontaneity but each performer is asked to stick to their determined set of movements in a manner that is straightforward, direct and recognisable by the audience. In this way the power of Silva’s performances exists in the interactions between the individual performers and between the performers and the viewer. If Silva’s paintings are the generation of a new, feminist language, her performances present it in use, functioning, operational and highly subjective.
Silva’s work with performance has also deepened her own understanding of her paintings. For her, her paintings now operate as absent performances and this has intensified her recognition of their muteness and ability to provide different means of communication: ‘I have started to stretch the canvases and to reduce everything to the surface of the painting’, she states. ‘I like the silent feeling that a painting on the wall instills in the viewer.’ The notion of the painting as an absent performance has pushed Silva to treat her activity upon the surface of the canvas almost as an event. She unstretches and restretches her paintings, rolls them up, reworks them by painting on both their sides or repurposes elements of old works. She utilises various household materials and layers myriad textures using frottage, pouring and folding, often she obliterates whole passages of paint with a washing machine or by submerging the work into the ocean or another body of water. The series Self-Portrait of a Landscape 2 (2018), created in Norway, incorporates snow and moss onto the surfaces of the works. And in Diary of a Space (2018-19), she uses frottage so deftly that the canvases become real time transcriptions of the studio surrounding her.
In these ways, Silva masters controlled randomness. The forms, glyphs and ciphers that appear on her canvases are impressions; traces of places, particular times, historical influences, personal memories and her own politics which she allows to enter her paintings and performances without codification or obfuscation. In this way her work offers a proposition, she proposes an alternative narrative – along with the new language through which to tell it – one that disrupts traditional means of authority and control and celebrates subjectivity, multiplicity and silence.
1 Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous in The Newly Born Woman, 1975
2 Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism), 2011
I wanted things that I couldn't at times articulate.
by Laura Smith, 2021
on Pink for flower, viaindustriae publishing, English/Italian ISBN 9788897753773
I wanted things that I couldn't at times articulate.
Helen Frankenthaler
Composed of an evolving alphabet of distinctive, nonfigurative forms, Caterina Silva’s paintings explode the structures of power that exist between language and authority, meaning and control. Through her abstracted and highly gestural brushwork she creates and explores the potential of non-codifiable and non-cooptable means of communication. In so doing, her works demonstrate how language and authority are intricately connected and constructed, and as such, latently dismantle-able.
The forms within Silva’s paintings and performances also reflect on the canon of art history as an authored and authorised narrative, which for a long time barred the work of women. Her works call to mind those paintings and painters that had been excluded, they shimmer with the energies of Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Carol Rama, Etel Adnan, Hilma af Klint, Joan Mitchell and many others, assimilating an array of historical references that have been – and continue to be – inspirational. These influences are combined with Silva’s personal memories, mythologies, and activist politics. What results is an entirely new corpus of glyphs and ciphers that tell a new story, one that is outside of the existing constructs of everyday language and simultaneously capable of incorporating the very histories that it has excluded. This endeavor finds resonance with the words of Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous in The Newly Born Woman: ‘there is a voice crying in the wilderness – the voice of a body dancing, laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it? The voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood.’
You have mystery service ahead, and you will soon enough realise what is expected of you.
Hilma af Klint
Of her work, Silva comments that she is interested in ‘what escapes language and its classification and control systems,’ she seeks to emphasise the feelings of powerlessness and discomfort that being outside of language generate, in order to ‘investigate the relationship between power and language and to question the violence of representation from a silent and non-discursive perspective.’ This has led her to develop her alphabet of gestures and forms that doesn’t have a clear and rational translation but allows her to create paintings that are open and available to the interpretation of the observer. She wants to find ways of using language in a non-appropriating way, receptive to endless interpretation and evolution. Such a (mis)use of the system of language is significant when thinking about Silva’s work from a feminist perspective, as Julia Kristeva comment: ‘to use language is to use a masculine system—and that means that in using language, women are always making a compromise of their own subjectivity.’ Through her production of an alternative and highly personal language, Silva therefore disrupts the authority of masculine language and refuses to compromise her own subjectivity.
The body of works titled Impressioni (2018) all reflect the intuitive processes through which Silva absorbs and articulates her surroundings (physical, emotional and historical) as data without a clear code. In this series, Silva translates her observations, feelings and reactions to certain places, times and daily routines into a set of gestural strokes. The paintings incorporate pigments, oil paint, spray-paint and ink, alongside dust, soil, roasted barley, turmeric, curcuma, liquorice, soap and other organic materials that she happened have around her; their brushstrokes escape identifiable language – and its definitions and hierarchies – and as such the works create a non-cooptable and highly feminist system that is unable to be pinned down.
A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.
Elaine de Kooning
In addition to her painting, another aspect of Silva’s artistic practice is her work with performance. For her the two mediums are not distinct but intricately and importantly connected. Performance offers a means for Silva to detach the act of painting from the processes of production, the materiality of the art object and the implications of the market. Her performances deliberately use the gestures – or alphabet – of her paintings, but without the paint and in somebody else’s hands. As she comments: ‘the gestures in both my in-studio [painting] process and during live events are at the same time spontaneous and hyper-mediated. In both cases controlled chance plays a role.’ Her performances generally employ a range of participants, each given five or so actions that represent translations of her painting process into bodily movements. The performers are free to reinterpret these actions according to their physical and imaginative possibilities. Rehearsals are generally kept to a minimum to encourage improvisation and spontaneity but each performer is asked to stick to their determined set of movements in a manner that is straightforward, direct and recognisable by the audience. In this way the power of Silva’s performances exists in the interactions between the individual performers and between the performers and the viewer. If Silva’s paintings are the generation of a new, feminist language, her performances present it in use, functioning, operational and highly subjective.
Silva’s work with performance has also deepened her own understanding of her paintings. For her, her paintings now operate as absent performances and this has intensified her recognition of their muteness and ability to provide different means of communication: ‘I have started to stretch the canvases and to reduce everything to the surface of the painting’, she states. ‘I like the silent feeling that a painting on the wall instills in the viewer.’ The notion of the painting as an absent performance has pushed Silva to treat her activity upon the surface of the canvas almost as an event. She unstretches and restretches her paintings, rolls them up, reworks them by painting on both their sides or repurposes elements of old works. She utilises various household materials and layers myriad textures using frottage, pouring and folding, often she obliterates whole passages of paint with a washing machine or by submerging the work into the ocean or another body of water. The series Self-Portrait of a Landscape 2 (2018), created in Norway, incorporates snow and moss onto the surfaces of the works. And in Diary of a Space (2018-19), she uses frottage so deftly that the canvases become real time transcriptions of the studio surrounding her.
In these ways, Silva masters controlled randomness. The forms, glyphs and ciphers that appear on her canvases are impressions; traces of places, particular times, historical influences, personal memories and her own politics which she allows to enter her paintings and performances without codification or obfuscation. In this way her work offers a proposition, she proposes an alternative narrative – along with the new language through which to tell it – one that disrupts traditional means of authority and control and celebrates subjectivity, multiplicity and silence.
1 Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous in The Newly Born Woman, 1975
2 Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism), 2011
Moira / Mɔjra / Mɔɪ.rə
by Marta Federici, 2021
on MACTE Digital
Moira / Mɔjra / Mɔɪ.rə is the title of Caterina Silva's project, conceived to inhabit the virtual space of MACTE Digital and centred around the story of an enigmatic creature, who unexpectedly ends up inside the museum website coming from another dimension. The name chosen by the artist for this character contains a stratification of meanings and references to various cultural contexts: from the Moirai of Greek tradition, the three daughters of Night who weave the thread of fate for human beings; to the mouras encantadas of the Portuguese folklore, the ancient Dolmen builders who are said to have lived under a spell imposed on them by their fathers or brothers. In the Christian tradition, the name Moira is not amongst any of the saints mentioned in the liturgical calendar and is therefore identified as masterless. The artist has delicately remixed these distant undertones to compose a fertile terrain where to plant the seeds of a new narrative. The plot structured by Silva echoes a contemporary mythology, which germinates among 2.0 web and bears the nuances of videogames.
Expanding on the artist's research into the relationship between power and codified languages, Moira / Mɔjra / Mɔɪ.rə specifically proposes an investigation of verbal language, understood as a tool that shapes reality and as a universe in which we are immersed. The project’s lines of reasoning move on two parallel planes: in the background there is an allusion to the process of abstraction affecting language globally in the age of late capitalism - technological and financial capitalism, which produces and incessantly modifies reality through alphanumeric strings; in the foreground, there is more of a direct analysis of some of the mechanisms underlying the functioning of human beings’ language. Using Italian, her mothertongue, as a reference, Silva exposes the linguistic dimension as a non-neutral field, in which the speaking subjects’ domination over the named objects represents a pattern constantly reproduced and nurtured. The micro-dynamics of power pointed out by the artist are at once the consequence and the origin of broader processes of prevarication taking place in social reality.
Where does the boundary between subjects and objects lie beyond verbal language? When, how and why is a person referred to as an object? Neither completely "thing" nor clearly "person", Moira embodies the shifting relationship between these two poles and tries to unhinge it, shattering the device of linguistic signification with her gestures and words. Overall, the events involving this character can be read as a long exercise in deconstructing the subject (on both a linguistic and physical level), but also as an unusual transformative ritual, seeking to lead the spectators towards unknown territories, where it is still possible to try and restore to the word its capacity to describe and transform the world without subjugating it. As the artist states, "the space where this may happen is a limbo, an halfway crossing, where words that aren’t known can be used in order to generate a language that one isn’t meant to learn. These words can be used to utter mysterious and extremely dangerous things".
The project is structured in four consecutive stages aligned with the phases of the lunar calendar.
by Marta Federici, 2021
on MACTE Digital
Moira / Mɔjra / Mɔɪ.rə is the title of Caterina Silva's project, conceived to inhabit the virtual space of MACTE Digital and centred around the story of an enigmatic creature, who unexpectedly ends up inside the museum website coming from another dimension. The name chosen by the artist for this character contains a stratification of meanings and references to various cultural contexts: from the Moirai of Greek tradition, the three daughters of Night who weave the thread of fate for human beings; to the mouras encantadas of the Portuguese folklore, the ancient Dolmen builders who are said to have lived under a spell imposed on them by their fathers or brothers. In the Christian tradition, the name Moira is not amongst any of the saints mentioned in the liturgical calendar and is therefore identified as masterless. The artist has delicately remixed these distant undertones to compose a fertile terrain where to plant the seeds of a new narrative. The plot structured by Silva echoes a contemporary mythology, which germinates among 2.0 web and bears the nuances of videogames.
Expanding on the artist's research into the relationship between power and codified languages, Moira / Mɔjra / Mɔɪ.rə specifically proposes an investigation of verbal language, understood as a tool that shapes reality and as a universe in which we are immersed. The project’s lines of reasoning move on two parallel planes: in the background there is an allusion to the process of abstraction affecting language globally in the age of late capitalism - technological and financial capitalism, which produces and incessantly modifies reality through alphanumeric strings; in the foreground, there is more of a direct analysis of some of the mechanisms underlying the functioning of human beings’ language. Using Italian, her mothertongue, as a reference, Silva exposes the linguistic dimension as a non-neutral field, in which the speaking subjects’ domination over the named objects represents a pattern constantly reproduced and nurtured. The micro-dynamics of power pointed out by the artist are at once the consequence and the origin of broader processes of prevarication taking place in social reality.
Where does the boundary between subjects and objects lie beyond verbal language? When, how and why is a person referred to as an object? Neither completely "thing" nor clearly "person", Moira embodies the shifting relationship between these two poles and tries to unhinge it, shattering the device of linguistic signification with her gestures and words. Overall, the events involving this character can be read as a long exercise in deconstructing the subject (on both a linguistic and physical level), but also as an unusual transformative ritual, seeking to lead the spectators towards unknown territories, where it is still possible to try and restore to the word its capacity to describe and transform the world without subjugating it. As the artist states, "the space where this may happen is a limbo, an halfway crossing, where words that aren’t known can be used in order to generate a language that one isn’t meant to learn. These words can be used to utter mysterious and extremely dangerous things".
The project is structured in four consecutive stages aligned with the phases of the lunar calendar.