Silvia Rosi
Encounter

Exhibition Details

In Encounter, photographer Silvia Rosi explores the recent history of her family and her identity as an Italian woman of African descent.

Inspired by an image from her family album that portrays the artist's mother as a young trader at the Lomé market in Togo, Rosi retraced the migratory path her parents faced in the late 1980s to reach Italy. Using an aesthetic that refers to the West African school of studio portraits, Rosi performs a narrative performance, taking the figure of her mother as a muse and recreating family stories told thanks to the combination of photography, text and video. The act of head-carrying, for example, is a skill traditionally transmitted from mother to daughter that is central to Rosi's project.

Encounter is a deeply personal story that at the same time deals with some universal themes. An attempt to recover a tradition that has been lost through migration and its position as a European. A tribute to the family album that represents an object in continuous transformation and re-contextualization with the passage of time and the progress of relationships.