Artist Statement
“Les racines flottantes / Floating Roots / Raíces flotantes”
My artistic practice emerges from constant movement — from the heritage of several generations who experienced displacement as a way of life.
My grandparents emigrated from Italy and Spain to Argentina; my mother is born there and later moved to Canada.
I was born in Argentina, grew up in Québec, Montréal, and now live in Norway.
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 giving up movement.
My work explores that 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 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 a moment of fleeting rootedness; installation creates spaces where memory, displacement, and identity converse in the present.
My works arise both from personal experience and from a concern with the contemporary world: new migrations, the rejection of the foreigner, the fragility of human borders.
I wish to speak of travel as a contemporary condition — of movement not only physical, but also emotional and symbolic.
In a time when migrants are often persecuted or made invisible, I seek to reclaim the hum
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.
She is the founder of Prima Ink, a printmaking atelier dedicated to contemporary graphic arts, and has participated as a coordinator in Tromsø Open (2011–2012). Her work has been exhibited in Norway, Canada, Chile, and France.
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.