Mr Bawa I suppose

Mr Bawa, I presume Giovanna Silva The title of the exhibition, “Mr Bawa, I presume”, comes from the inner dialogue which takes place every time the author is in front of one of Geoffrey Manning Bawa buildings. In her photographs Silva explores the fleeting edge where different worlds meet. Along these lines of accidental collision, the architectural language withdraws and gives way to places slowly shaped between our memory and vision. Focusing on the results that this collision produces, Giovanna Silva provides us an unusual perspective on architecture and landscape: “I start to take picture while the world still asleep; I manage to immerse the buildings in a suspended dimension. They seem inhabited, a part from the trace left by people the day before. The result is a photo of unclean architecture, apparently inanimate but instead dotted with objects testifying the secret life of architecture.” Working between script and gaze, the photographic sequences bring us into an invisible dimension, disclosing a narration that is alternative to the official history of architecture. At the center of her work is not just the architecture but also the personal story of the architect where she finds herself: “my pictures and my works always begin from a narrative inspiration more than a starting fact. I’ve read that after having worked as a lawyer, he decided to become architect and went back to study in England. I was fascinated by the fact that he changed his life when he was 38 years old, I’m nearly 39 years old. Then I discovered his obsessive side, leading him to consider in his entire life only black and white (not by chance he has chosen a Dalmatian as a dog), his tendency to consider the architectural experience a team work, a reason why he would involve in his project artists and friends.” The photographs will be showcased between CAMPO and the Leporello library, marking a path in the city where the work could meet the absent-minded look of the passer-by. The street is the place where Silva’s encounter with Bawa’s work can live again in each chance encounter between the photographs and the involuntary gaze of the viewer. Together with Silva we might think: “Mr Bawa, I presume”.