Silvia Morin (b. 1998) turns her own body into the mediumthrough which she stages women’s biographies that were interrupted by male violence. Morin’s “psychic” photographs are the final outcome of a process of empathic identification with her subject’s stories, that goes through a performative phase in which the use of clothes play a peculiar function. The artist does not use costumes, instead she draws from her own everyday: rather than setting up a cosmetic disguise, Morin creates in her images a paradoxical coincidence between her life and the life of those women by triggering an emotional and temporal confusion. Far from being real self-portrait or simple representation, Morin’s women are additional characters, not yet realised, that appear to be coming back for necessity, to affirm a pacification.
For LAVAPIU Morin presents a previously unreleased work dedicated to Lea Garofalo. Lea was a justice collaborator murdered in 2009 during an ambush by her ex-boyfriend, a member of the organised crime group Ndrangheta, in an apartment in Milan city centre. In 2013, the year when Lea Garofalo’s body was found, Morin partakes accidentally to her funeral.