‘Year ten’, from the series ‘10227 days of lost affection’
Inkjet photo print, 44cm x 36cm
2010

‘Year twenty-four’, from the series ‘10227 days of lost affection’
Inkjet photo print, 44cm x 36cm
2010

‘Year twenty-eight’, from the series ‘10227 days of lost affection’
Inkjet photo print, 44cm x 36cm
2010

‘Remains #5’, from the series ‘The Orchestra’
Fine art print, 70cm x 85cm
2011

‘Swollen meat will feed the birds’, from the series ‘The Orchestra’
Fine art print, 125cm x 100cm
2011

‘My 100 words’, from the series ‘The Orchestra’
Fine art print, 100cm x 125cm
2011

Sofia Silva

Sofia Silva was born in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1982. She graduated in Photography in 2008 after coming to terms with all the excitement and soul searching the first years of her adult life had brought. The following year, and in the midst of falling in love, she moved to the Glasgow School of Art, where she is now concluding an MFA with the generous help of a Caloust Gulbenkian Foundation grant (well, someone must have been generous at some point!) and packing to go on a very exciting journey to do a PhD in Communication, for she has just been accepted in the European Graduate School, in Switzerland.

Statement

There is a private and autobiographical nature intrinsic to my work that is becoming ever more abstract and surreal. Ever since an ontological quest for “authenticity” came into play, dreams, experiences and intuition have been brought to surface. Although aware of the importance of each specific language to be apprehended I trust the silence within one’s discourse can be heard, if only authenticity is at its core.

Photography is known to be the medium of the real, of what is concrete. Though I’ve always used it as a tool to document an inexistent and very ephemeral world, I’ve wondered how to overcome the immediacy of the medium without recurring to stylize and artificial techniques; how could one be respectful of the subject and objective in relation to it at the same time?

In order to let the ideas be, in order to emphasize the reality depicted in the photographs, the objects are now at the core of my practice. Hopefully they are as simple, symbolic and concrete as the nature of photography is and in this symbiosis they can grow autonomously.