Silvia Bigi: Decolonizing the Gaze Through Photography and AI

Italian artist Silvia Bigi (Ravenna, 1985) is featured in the exhibition 'The Families of Man' at the Museo Archeologico di Aosta until October. Her practice spans photography and sound, exploring the real versus reality while aiming to decolonize the gaze. In her series 'From dust you came', she scrapes pigment from old family photographs, transforming them into new pigments for abstract watercolors and acrylics—an iconoclastic yet intimate act that preserves memory. Another project, 'Il Codice', reimagines the Kanun, an ancient Albanian code, by inventing thirteen secret precepts embroidered in white thread on white fabric, invisible to male eyes, questioning historical memory. During the pandemic, Bigi collected 39 dreams from people worldwide and fed them to a text-to-image AI algorithm, producing abstract, hybrid images reminiscent of 20th-century avant-garde painting. She describes her artistic action as a 'genetic variation' injected into cultural systems, accelerating change. The interview was conducted by Ginevra Barbetti for Artribune.