Artist Statement
Floating Roots / Les Racines Flottantes / Raíces Flotantes
Across countries, languages, and cultures, the roots of my family story have never been fixed. They drift between territories, memories, and climates, continuously searching for new ground while never abandoning movement. I describe this condition as Floating Roots—roots that move, transform, and continue to grow without belonging to a single place.
Although this project originates from my personal history of migration, it has gradually evolved into a broader artistic research. Today, Floating Roots explores migration not only as a human experience but as a universal process that shapes landscapes, materials, ecosystems, and cultures. I am interested in what moves, what adapts, what leaves traces, and what takes root elsewhere.
Working across printmaking, paper, textiles, photography, drawing, sculpture, and installation, I investigate how materials themselves carry memory. Paper, made from plant fibres, becomes a metaphor for both fragility and resilience. Printed textiles absorb and transform images. Organic materials change over time. Each surface actively participates in the work, suggesting that memory is never fixed but constantly rewritten through transformation.
Printmaking lies at the heart of my practice. I approach it not simply as a technique of reproduction but as a language of transmission, layering, disappearance, and renewal. Repeated impressions, fragments of maps, handwritten texts, photographs, and natural forms become visual traces of movement, displacement, and belonging.
Increasingly, my work develops through dialogue with scientists, local communities, and artists from different disciplines. These collaborations allow me to connect artistic research with environmental questions, material studies, and shared knowledge, expanding the possibilities of contemporary printmaking beyond the studio.
Through immersive installations, I create spaces where memory, landscape, and material coexist. My work invites viewers to reflect on the invisible relationships between humans and the living world, where borders remain permeable and identities continue to evolve.
Ultimately, Floating Roots asks how we inhabit a world in constant transformation. It proposes that roots are not fixed anchors but living structures—capable of drifting, adapting, connecting, and growing across invisible borders.
Bio
Silvia E. M. was born in Argentina and lived and studied in Canada from 1973 to 2001. In 2001, she moved to Tromsø, Norway, where she continues to live and work between Tromsø and Montréal.
Her education took place in the field, in the streets, between languages and borders. She learned through the places she has lived, the people she has met, and the landscapes she has crossed. Each migration has been a school, each language a lesson, each silence a form of knowledge. That is where her artistic practice was built — in life itself, in motion, in experience. Institutions gave her tools, but the world has been her true studio.
She is the founder of Prima Ink, an evolving artistic platform that moves beyond traditional studio and residency models to foster collaboration, exchange, and shared research across territories and lived experiences. Through Prima Ink, she develops projects that explore printmaking as an expanded, environmentally conscious practice, open to experimentation and dialogue.