Giovanna Silva (Milano, 1980) studied at Politecnico di Milano (Milano). Her work was featured at 10° Biennale di Architettura (Venice). Among her personal projects, Desertions, Narratives/Relazioni: Baghdad, Green Zone, Red Zone, Babylon and Orantes. She is publisher of Humboldt Books and collaborated with Abitare, Domus, Doppiozero, San Rocco.

I’ve always travelled since when I was a kid, with my parents, in pretty exotic places. Obviously I suffered it, up to a certain age. I wanted to go to the beach like the other kids. But, in retrospective, it was the greatest gift that they could give me. Because for me traveling is resting. I rest my mind and, at the same time I change. Then, around my thirties, I realised that what I was really interested in was transforming traveling into a project, and this project looked like a book.

Since when I was a kid I was passionate about architecture. I remember that I was designing and re-designing my bedroom – and I was so disappointed when my parents involved a real architect to redesign the house, already at the age of 5 I felt ready to wear a helmet and follow the demolition works – and I thought that architecture would have made me travel and discover new worlds. Sure, there is an architect on a million. Anyway I studied architecture, they were the best years of my life and I learned a key thing: the importance of team work in a project. Once I graduated in architecture, after my state exam, I enrolled to Anthropology. At that stage I was missing more humanistic studies. And there I found out about travel narrative with a dissertation on Alexander von Humboldt.

I discovered Mollino during my university studies, he’s always been a frowned-upon figure in the academic world, maybe he would define himself an outsider. The only one who talked about him in Milan’s Politecnico was Corrado Levi, who always was brave enough to bring something new in the often stagnating world of university. I rediscovered him through Fulvio Ferrari, of Casa Mollino, in Torino, for the Nightswimming project. In fact Mollino designed the Lutrario, one of the first discothèques in Italy. I knew that Mollino had left everything to the Archive of Turin’s Politecnico, I arranged a meeting, I browsed through the various boxes and I found these travel photos. Sure, they were different from Mollino’s photographs that we all know, they weren’t posed, they weren’t studied as his famous Polaroids. I was interested in their dynamic as travel notes, they are photos taken quickly.

Pure chance. I was working for the magazine Abitare and the asked me if I wanted to go to Afghanistan to photograph a school designed by 2a+p/A and Ian+ (Rome) for Grazia Cutili, a journalist for the Corriere Della Sera who was killed in Afghanistan in 2001. I accepted and it was a unique experience, there I met Antonio Ottomanelli, photographer and former architect. We left for Iraq together the next year. The second title of the series Narratives with Mousse was Libia, a trip that I strongly wanted, hard to organise, for reasons that you may imagine, but I had been obsessed with the figure of Gheddafi for years. Then Cyprus came naturally, through my friendship and collaboration with Christodoulos Panayiotou, artist and friend of Limassol’s.
It was definitely very different working in war areas, or where physical safety is lower anyway. I never felt in danger though, paradoxically I found myself less comfortable in situations of normality.

The apartment you see was my grandmother’s house. She had it designed by an architect in 1952 and it hasn’t been modified since. When she died she left it to me and it was so beautiful, like time had stopped. Living there would have been a little difficult from a maintenance point of view, each object requires an obsessive attention that I cannot provide myself in my everyday life, so I turned it into a sort of museum. We, the girls of Humboldt Books, are all hidden in a room behind our computers. But looking outside we can see Milan transforming…