Even This Will Pass – Aida Silvestri
Aida Silvestri – http://www.aidasilvestri.com/section731496.html
Roman Road Gallery – http://www.romanroad.com/projects/aida-silvestri/
Rehsom, 2013, Aida Silvestri
“Even This Will Pass” is a new perspective on the lives of refugees by Aida Silvestri. Shown at the Roman Road Gallery this spring, the show focuses on the journey and experiences that refugees have had to take to reach the UK. In this series, all of the sitters come from Silvestri’s home country of Eritrea. Eritrea is run by a dictatorial government who abuse the citizens even most basic of human rights. Trying to escape the country is by itself a crime punishable by death not just for the citizen but their entire family also.
The series was made up of 9 blurred portraits each with a unique piece of string threaded into the print. The string represents the sitters journey across the world with each point on the string representing a different form of travel that they took. This fact is made all the more powerful by the large map that is drawn onto the wall of the gallery. On the map is a copy of each individual string, all coming from the same location and ending in the same location. What’s amazing is when we see that every refugee has taken a different route to reach the UK, some seemingly easy, others incredible complex.
The photographers aim for this series is to “raise awareness of human trafficking and to bring to light different experiences and difficulties that the sitters faced on an uncertain voyage to exile which can sometimes be dreadful.” (Aida Silvestri 2013)* The exhibition certainly makes us think more about the journey that refugees have to take to try and find safety and the inevitable dangers that the most have to face along the way.
Visual Exploration 