ANA SILVA: Eau

Spazio Zero at the GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo presents Eau, the first solo exhibition in an Italian institution by Angolan-Portuguese artist Ana Silva (Calulo, 1979). Conceived specifically for the Bergamo museum’s project space, the exhibition unfolds in continuity with Silva’s ongoing research while addressing one of the most urgent crises of our time: access to water. The theme runs throughout the exhibition, shaping a layered reflection on resources, inequality and shared global responsibility.

Developed for Spazio Zero, Eau stems from a collaboration with a network of local embroiderers invited by the artist to intervene on selected textile works, activating a concrete dialogue between artistic practice and local context. This involvement goes far beyond technical contribution; it becomes integral to the conceptual framework of the project. Embroidery – traditionally associated with care, memory and resilience – emerges here as a shared tool of awareness, capable of rendering visible a reality in which water is not a guaranteed right but a privilege.

Silva’s production process both reflects and questions specific cultural dynamics. In an initial phase, the subjects she designs are entrusted to Angolan embroiderers: in Angola, only men are permitted to use sewing machines. The artist then personally completes the works by hand, adding embellishments, glitter and sequins. This dual passage – between conception and delegation, machine and manual gesture, collective execution and individual intervention – becomes a metaphor for the tensions that traverse her practice. Issues of gender, social roles, local economies and global circuits converge in a methodology that deliberately slows industrial time, introducing a bodily, repetitive and intimate temporality.

Ana Silva’s broader research operates at the intersection of memory, materiality and socio-cultural critique, engaging with the effects of globalization, consumer culture and transcontinental flows. Her work begins with a gesture that is both simple and radical: reclaiming textiles, techniques and forms of female knowledge long confined to the private sphere and repositioning them as a contemporary artistic language. The industrial fabrics she employs carry complex histories. Mass-produced in Africa or for African markets, once central to everyday life, they now accumulate, are forgotten or replaced, becoming waste within a global system driven by accelerated production and consumption. Silva consciously inserts herself into this cycle, recovering and re-signifying chosen materials; through embroidery, she interrupts the linearity of industrial processes and reinscribes fabric within a broader ecosystem in which sustainability is not only environmental but also cultural and social.

The female figures inhabiting her works – fragile presences, sometimes incomplete, embedded within geometric patterns that evoke serial production, global markets and enduring colonial legacies – embody this tension between individual and system. By intervening in these patterns, the artist introduces a pause, a breath: freehand drawing, exposed threads and the absence of definitive finishing assert a refusal of fixed identity or singular narrative. The bodies depicted are bodies in the making, shaped by layered histories and open to transformation.

Alongside recent works, Eau also presents a significant corpus of earlier pieces tracing the evolution of Silva’s practice, including the series O Fardo / Vestir Memórias. These works are created from plastic and raffia sacks used to transport second-hand clothing from Europe to Africa for resale in local markets. Filled not only with garments but with invisible trajectories and embedded histories, the sacks are removed from their original function and reconfigured as narrative surfaces. Here again, Silva intervenes through embroidery and stitching, incorporating human figures, scenes of everyday life and symbolic motifs linked to childhood, care, social life and the transmission of memory. The choice of support is far from neutral: a material associated with waste exposes economic asymmetries between the Global North and South, interrogates consumption circuits and makes visible the environmental and social consequences of overproduction generated in the North and offloaded onto Southern countries. At the same time, these works propose a sensitive and poetic reclamation of residue, transforming it into a medium of resistance, affirmation and reconstruction.

Within the exhibition, ecology emerges as a complex network of relationships between bodies, materials, histories and systems of production. Silva asks what narratives can arise from what has been forgotten or discarded, constructing a trajectory in which textile practice, social research and environmental awareness intertwine in a critical rereading of the everyday. Eau is on view through 6 September 2026.

Born in 1979 in Calulo, Ana Silva lives and works between Portugal, Angola and Brazil, navigating diverse territories, experiences and cultures that resonate in the visual and conceptual layering of her work. Over the course of her career, she has exhibited at numerous international institutions, including the Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Kunsthaus Baselland, the Museu de História Natural de Luanda and the Dak’Art Biennale, as well as venues in Lisbon and Bonnieux. Her works are held in major public and private collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Fondation H and Fonds de Dotation Agnès b. in Paris, Fondation Gandur pour l’Art in Geneva and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. With Eau, GAMeC offers Italian audiences the opportunity to engage with one of the most compelling transcontinental voices in contemporary art today, whose practice seamlessly interweaves formal research, social responsibility and participatory activation of exhibition space.