(EF)FACE – Hidden
Features – Aida Silvestri

Aida Silvestri, born in Eritrea in 1978 and based in London, is a visual artist working across photography, video, and installation. Her practice explores questions of identity, migration, and memory, focusing on narratives that are often overlooked or rendered invisible. She creates works that combine documentary and poetic approaches, where the image becomes a space of testimony and resistance.

The series Even This Will Pass focuses on the journeys of Eritrean refugees who fled their country to reach the United Kingdom to escape the dictator who has governed Eritrea for more than twenty years, keeping the population under strong surveillance and with no freedom of speech or religion and no right to leave the country.

Through deliberately blurred portraits designed to protect the identities of the individuals, Silvestri evokes fear, secrecy, and the precariousness of these experiences. On the surface of the photographs, she adds hand-stitched lines in thread, mapping the migration routes and key stages of the journey.

These interventions transform the photograph into a tactile and mnemonic object, where the act of stitching becomes a form of intimate cartography of displacement. Each work is accompanied by a journal or written testimony that provides additional insight into lived experiences. Together, these elements form a fragmented narrative between image, trace, and text, giving visibility to trajectories that are often silenced.