On the occasion of this rendez-vous with the 100%SHE column we had a chat with the artist Silvia Giambrone, Sicilian artist born in 1981 who now lives and works between Rome and London.
Silvia Giambrone is an artist who uses different expressive mediums, such as performance, sculpture and video art, to address discourses and themes that belong to the sphere of reality, to the world.
With Silvia we talked about her role and her experience as a woman artist within the art sphere and within society and about her installation “The Hall of Shadows” made on the occasion of the Dior Fall/Winter 2021/2022 fashion show inside Versailles.


Through an artistic practice that uses different mediums Silvia Giambrone explores the policy of the body, with a focus on the violence we make and suffer from, both physical and psychological.
The artist turns a critical look at the domestic environment in which she brings out the removed, alarm bells thanks to which we can see what is familiar to us and we stopped observing. The artist deepens the theme and the taboo of violence in the domestic environment, trying to understand and unearth the human tendency towards brutality, putting at the same time in discussion its domestication and normalization.


The series of work through which she addressed this theme the most are the mirrors she creates by removing the glass from the frame and filling the frame with wax and thorns.
The mirror is commonly understood as an object that reflects the identity of those who stand in front of it, in this case it becomes a revealing object from which we instinctively move away because we fear it may hurt us, sting us. The union of wax and thorns attracts and repels the observer at the same time and becomes a witness of the violence present in a given context.



We leave you now to the interview with the artist Silvia Giambrone in which she tells us what it means to be a woman artist today and how to change the patriarchal vision of history.

F.M. Do you feel discriminated for being a woman artist?

S.G. The discrimination that I perceive is certainly there, I have no doubt, but it is on such a subtle level, so concealed that then I find it difficult to describe exactly what it consists of.
I grew up in Italy, where there is a certain tradition in man-woman relationships in which it seems that if one discriminates you, he substantially flatters you. Today it is probably different, but when I went to university, Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, my professor told me “Silvia I give you the grade 30 because you are so beautiful”, which bothered me a lot because this belittled me in a sense, but for him, who was almost 70, that was a compliment, he didn’t understand the fact that it bothered me. We are talking about a level of subtle discrimination, but if the professor had to choose someone to send to an award, he wasn’t sending me, I am not sure he wasn’t sending me because I am a woman, but deep down I know he took me less seriously than my fellow men.

F.M. When it comes to the art market, do you feel discriminated just for being woman? Do you that if you were a man your works would have sold at higher prices?

S.G. I think that, at a market level, women are inevitably limited first of all because museum acquisitions of works by women are infinitely smaller, so this over time creates a difference, a distance. I think I’d have more market if I were a man? I think that I would be able to create my market more easily, precisely because of those dynamics I mentioned earlier, I would have more freedom and spontaneity to act and this would favour me, I can’t prove it, is a personal opinion. When I was 20 I was still not at the Academy of Fine Arts, I was at a wedding in Reggio Emilia, I was already very passionate about art, I wanted to do the Academy, I remember that I met this painter who friends of mine introduced me to and said “you know that also Silvia wants to be an artist” and this painted told me “Oh well, but these are works for men” and I could not believe that this painter made such an affirmation with so much boldness; I think that, in a hidden way, this still lives in the minds of many, even of many women.

F.M. Tell us about you experience with Dior at Versailles. What did it mean for you to install your mirrors in the mirror gallery in Versailles?

S.G. The project with Dior has been very important for me, on an artistic level because it allowed me to put together a series of elements that belong to my work and that I have been wanting to put together for a long time. When the curator Paola Ugolini told me that Mariagrazia Chiuri wanted me to create the installation for the show I saw a great dream come true. It has been a long time since I started thinking about how my mirrors would have been inside the Gallery of Mirrors in Versailles. For me to replace, or rather to cover, the king’s mirrors with mine made of wax and thorns is a great achievement, it represents a reappropriation of a historically patriarchal place, a place of power. We often wonder about the destination that some monuments that no longer represent our history should have, I believe that they should be used to host works of art by women artists so that we can claim what was previously taken from women artists before us and we can free some places of their patriarchal connotation, this should be one of our vocations.