Artist Statement
“Les racines flottantes / Floating Roots / Raíces flotantes”
Across these geographies, the roots of my family story have never been fixed: they drift between territories, languages, and climates, as if searching for a ground to rest upon without ever giving up movement. I refer to this condition as Les racines flottantes / Floating Roots / Raíces flotantes — roots that move, transform, and exist in a state of continuous becoming.
My work explores the tension between belonging and being outside, between nostalgia and adaptation. I am interested in what is emotionally inherited from exile, even without having lived it directly — that subtle feeling of never being completely at home, yet never entirely foreign.
I work with paper, drawing, photography, and installation — mediums that allow traces, layers, and imprints to emerge. Paper, fragile and transportable, becomes a metaphor for the migrant body; photography captures moments of fleeting rootedness; installation creates spaces where memory, displacement, and identity can meet and coexist in the present.
My works arise both from personal experience and from a broader concern with the contemporary world: new migrations, the rejection of the foreigner, and the fragility of human borders. I approach travel as a contemporary condition — not only physical, but also emotional and symbolic.
In a time when migrants are often made invisible or reduced to statistics, I seek to restore a sense of presence — to give form to what moves, what is carried, and what remains.
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.