Giovanna Silva paints a sinuous, compulsive, dizzying and poetic portrait of the city of Milan through several hundred series of detailed photographs of modern and contemporary building facades.
"We left Ponte Sesto because we wanted to end our excursion in the cemetery extension designed by Rossi. We cautiously removed a loose lock on a closed door and sneaked into the beautiful turquoise octagonal chapel—a sort of holy trespassing. In this cemetery we found the best grave design we had ever encountered: a glass vitrine containing a photo of a sports car, a gun, and a bottle of liqueur.
Pieve Emanuele looks like a village designed by the gentle hand of Canella for a new generation of young pioneers: housing blocks whose size rival Berlin's Karl-Marx-Allee, a futuristic sport center, and a church which looks like a spaceship ready for take-off.
Still in Pieve Emanuele, a plexiglass box containing a Bianchi race bike mounted on a pole captured our attention. A sign revealed an ambitious project: a small garden dedicated to the famous cyclist Fausto Coppi complete with an altar holding images of his triumphs. Today the whole complex lies abandoned and full of trashed furniture. The project's initiator, the former major of this little town, was dismissed during the political turmoil which plagued Italy back in the 1990s. To be clear, Coppi had nothing to do with Pieve Emanuele, while it seems evident that the whole country had something to do with Coppi."—Giovanni Piovene
Giovanna Silva (born 1980 in Milan) is an Italian photographer, writer and publisher. Her photographic books have been published by Mousse, Hatje Cantz, and Nero among others. Her work has been shown at the 10th and 14th Venice architectural biennales, MACRO in Rome, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, the Triennale in Milan, the American Academy in Rome, FRAC Orléans, c/o Berlin, the Biennale de Rabat 2019, and the Italian Cultural Institute in New York. She is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Humboldt Books and the co-founder of San Rocco magazine. She teaches Photography at NABA Milan, IUAV Venice's master in photography program, and ISIA Urbino.
