Ways to live:
Reflections on Silvi Kadillari’s Testing Grounds residency, March 2021
Two prisoners whose cell walls adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the
thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and god. Every
separation is a link. - Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Silvi recalls to me the moment she had as a child when she first encountered the idea of windows to a house
being what the are eyes are to the body. The architectural flip-side of the common saying that ‘the eyes are the
windows to the soul.’ Her child mind immediately made the connection between curtains or window furnishings
and eyelids. I am reminded of childhood fascinations with seeing and being seen, games of peek-a-boo, hide
and seek, and the moments when children think that they can’t be seen if they cover their eyes, despite their
bodies being within full view.
I had a similar fascination with thresholds to Silvi as a child - spending what seemed like hours to my 4-yearold
brain looking out of windows, looking at the dead flies on windowsills and staring at the street outside
through the metal grate security door. I spent ages watching the patterns in the security door shift as I moved
slightly from side to side. In these moments, thresholds became spaces which held a strange kind of agency of
their own.
Silvi expresses some slight reservations about exploring some personal territory in this most recent body of
work. As is a relentless task for artists, Silvi has been wrestling with this tension between inside and outside,
between what has a significant meaning within her own inner world of thought and memory, and what
transcends that world into a public space of shared meaning. Looking at her work, I am convinced that this
entry into personal history and memory has a quality that spills out into a space of new and shared meaning,
transgressing our perceived limits of the personal.
As part of this recent body of work, Silvi has been dismantling and re-assembling objects from her life, things
she has owned, worn and kept over time. Some of them are gifts of pieces of costume jewellery she received
from visiting relatives from her own place of origin in Albania. She shares that she doesn’t feel guilt about
dismantling these objects, although doing so has been a process of examining the feelings that have been
attached to them.
Silvi’s pulling apart of personal objects involves a desire to understand how the dismantled pieces operate on
their own. By losing their origin, do they disintegrate into empty signifiers, links of chains unable to generate
meaning on their own? To me, this process does involve some kind of a loss, but one that makes way for the
formation of a new syntax; a new structure of meaning. By reimagining her relationship to these objects and
pieces of her personal history, Silvi is opening up space for herself.
I feel like there is something about the kind of loss that happens in the making of art, present in Silvi’s practice
that opens up the possibility for something greater, and for others to enter in. There is a sharing of the self that
is a kind of generative loss. In the essay Black Sun, Kristeva writes “my depression points to my not knowing
how to lose - I have perhaps been unable to find a valid compensation for the loss? It follows that any loss
entails the loss of my being - and of Being itself.” Silvi’s work is an active counterweight to this natural direction
of thought preceded by loss.
Silvi ends her poem, Sweaty Swings with the lines “and i slip my foot back in my shoe/and think about ways to
live.” Without undertaking the kinds of risks an artist such as Silvi has, we might all still be living as kids with
our hands over our eyes, feeling safe in the ‘not seeing’ despite being in full view. To me, the work that Silvi
has undertaken over this residency has been an imagining of different “ways to live” that allows a kind of loss
to generate a shared yet still safe and intimate space.
Written by Miranda King