ArtsLife | Silvia Levenson

by Carlo Madesani, 11/16/2024

We meet Silvia Levenson in her home/studio in Lesa on Lake Maggiore, in the province of Novara. The studio is set in what was once a large paper mill, now divided and transformed into several residential units. A small stream runs alongside it, surrounded by dense woodland, with a private dead-end road and a view of the lake.

Silvia, you were born in Buenos Aires in 1957. What happened that made you decide to come to Italy?

In 1976, there was a military coup in Argentina that resulted in the disappearance of 30,000 people. We call them “desaparecidos” because at first, the military denied their existence, but they were killed after being tortured in clandestine concentration camps. My ex-husband and I were leftist militants and, like many Argentinians, we were persecuted. In ’78, a paramilitary group came to take us from my in-laws’ house, which was our formal address; fortunately, we didn’t live there. During those years, two of my cousins were killed, and their mother, my aunt Elsa Rabinovich de Levenson, was thrown from a plane during the terrible death flights. We resisted until 1980 when we arrived in Italy after a journey by ship. I was 23 years old, with an 11-month-old son and a 4-year-old daughter.

What do you do here, away from everyone and everything?

I ask myself that sometimes! Here, I can have a studio that I couldn’t afford in Milan, but I can enjoy absolute concentration, silence, and more humane rhythms. At first, I thought that being so isolated would hinder the development of my work. But by 2000, I was mostly working abroad, so it didn’t make much difference. Naturally, I travel a lot because I need to see the world.

Your art intertwines with the journey of your life, full of symbols and references between tenderness and love, but also pain.

That’s true. I remember that when democracy returned to Argentina in 1984, I had the opportunity to talk to my uncle, Gregorio Levenson, who was very important to me. He told me the stories of my Russian grandparents who emigrated to Argentina in 1905 after participating in the first uprisings against the czars and who arrived in Buenos Aires looking for a quieter place to live and raise their children.

I realized then that that journey that began in Russia had never stopped.

Another aunt, Raquel Levenson, went to Spain in 1937 to fight against Franco, but with the defeat of the Spanish Republicans, she ended up in the USSR, where her son was born. It was at that moment, listening to those stories, that I felt the need to start a work that would make me reflect and understand what was around me.

I was not interested in abstraction or landscape but in my feelings, in the experiences that mark each person’s journey, trying to represent the intensity of my emotions and the history of my origins.