Silvia Rosi

Silvia Rosi (born 1992, Scandiano, Italy) is a Togolese-Italian artist whose photographic and moving-image practice explores migration, memory, and diasporic identity through staged self-portraiture. Drawing from personal history and broader narratives of movement between West Africa and Europe, Rosi uses her own body as a central subject to investigate how identity is constructed, performed, and remembered across generations. Her work often references West African studio photography traditions, particularly those of mid-20th-century photographers such as Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, while reinterpreting these visual languages within a contemporary, diasporic framework. Through carefully composed images, the use of costume, props, and gesture, Rosi inhabits multiple personas, reflecting the layered and fragmented nature of identity shaped by migration and cultural inheritance. Rosi’s practice is deeply engaged with oral histories and storytelling, particularly narratives surrounding her family’s migration from Togo to Italy. Her works frequently examine the gaps, silences, and reinterpretations that occur across generations, using performance and repetition to reconstruct memory as both personal and collective. By combining photography with video and installation, she creates immersive narratives that blur distinctions between fact and fiction.