Born in Lisbon (Portugal), Sílvia Olivença traces her path in photography by exploring freely the construction of personal meanings (visual and/or narrative) within the relation between the self-experience and ‘founded images’, using as main medium the photography, but recurring also to small installations and collages.

Silvia graduated from ISPA (Lisbon) in dynamic (psychoanalytic) and clinical psychology. She is presently a doctoral student in anthropology (Lisbon, Paris, Rabat) and participates in several national and international research projects.

Much of her work stems from this formative and travelling experience, during which, encounters, different cultural and living contexts are the melting pot to produce personal experiences that can be embodied in those ‘founded images’.

Drawing on the notion/theories of ‘relational objects’ and ‘transitional space’, the still image (photography, collages, etc.) functions as a powerful and meaningful interpretation to a personal content (emotion, experience). Uncounscious contents and experience elements are transformed in a visual product, that can be used by conscious thought.  The ‘founded image’, becomes therefore a possible interpretation to significative experience and unconsciousness contents within a dialogical relation between the photographer’s inner-world and the external world, promoting new connections and meanings between displaced and unconnected moments in time or/and distant geographical spaces.