Silvie Defraoui (1935)
Switzerland
Biography :
"Of Italian and German ancestry for one, Egyptian and French for the other, Silvie and Chérif Defraoui have lived in multiple places in the world and, since the 1960s, between Spain (Corbera de Llobregat) and the French-speaking Switzerland (Vufflens-le-Château). From different backgrounds – Chérif Defraoui studied literature and law in Geneva, Silvie Defraoui trained at the School of Fine Arts in Algiers and at the School of Decorative Arts in Geneva – they occupied, each on their own, before developing joint work, on the same questions, relating to the image, its status and its function in contemporary society.
Writing poetry, film and theater reviews, and texts on the Spanish cultural situation, in 1971 Chérif Defraoui presented his first personal exhibition at the Galerie Gaëtan in Geneva, while Silvie Defraoui exhibited the same year – also for the first times –, at the Kunstmuseum in St. Gall, his ceramics and sculptures related to architecture created during the previous decade.
In 1975, as partners, they carried out their first joint works – signed “C. & S. Defraoui” –, which are presented by the Galerie Gaëtan in Geneva. From 1975 to 1993, numerous exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad marked their artistic career, from Places of Memory, presented at the Center for Contemporary Art in Geneva in 1976, to Origins of Description, presented at the Magasin from Grenoble in 1993. Silvie and Chérif Defraoui play an important role on the Geneva artistic scene, notably through their teaching at the Ecole supérieure d'artvisual where they founded and directed the “mixed media” section since 1974.
The death of Chérif Defraoui, which occurred in 1994, did not mean the cessation of work. Silvie Defraoui continued her development, presenting new pieces in 1996 at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Geneva, at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and in the March Galleries in Stuttgart and Insam in Vienna.
The work of Silvie and Chérif Defraoui revolves around a reflection on the avatars of the image: “We have looked at and simply looked at images so much since the beginnings of Christianity,” they wrote in 1986, “that two thousand years later late we start to be blind.” Faced with the general inflation of images, they are interested not in the production of new images, but in the way in which we can perceive them, understand their meaning and judge their value other than subject to the visual conventions which condition the gaze. They question the power of the simplest and most condensed images, which refer to primary formal intuitions, available in the collective unconscious.
Using photographs as “found objects”, “waste of a collective imagination”, Silvie and Chérif Defraoui begin their artistic journey in an autobiographical way. This approach led in 1976 to the notion of Places of Memory, sorts of knowledge rituals whose origins lie before writing, and whose artists assume the "transformation" into a current language using means such as photography, lighting, frontal projections.
In 1975, Silvie and Chérif Defraoui set up a sort of system called Archives of the Future, which were created through the analysis of the paradoxes of the present and the past. In their duration and diversity, works and cycles of works such as The Road to the Indies (1978), Cartographies of the Countries to Come (1979), Instruments of Divination (1980), Conversations on a raft (1984), Orient/West (1987–89).
Convinced that a work of art must be an “agent of transformation”, they base their work on questioning conventional artistic categories and encouraging people to adopt a multiplicity of points of view. According to them, it is in the amplification of a simple perception that a plurality of views can be born. Favoring the diversity of means, they combine all kinds of techniques and produce multimedia works which do not aim at the object, but at more complex sets and the transition from one culture to another. Their installations, strategic devices which often establish the authority of an architectural support, focus attention on the danger which weighs on our “civilization of the image”, bulimic of rapid consumption of images. Their works, generally combining photographs, videos and painting, can first be read as a wandering of representation in a world of projections. Sometimes hiding things from view – truncated writing, photography obliterated by a large surface of color, veiled forms – Silvie and Chérif Defraoui highlight the way in which the vision is articulated and transmitted; they show how images emerging from the past, resulting from the transformation of reality or born from the virtual, float."
(Source, website, SIK)