Silvia Battista

My existential and artistic adventure is lead by an insatiable passion for what the theologian Rudolph Otto calls the experience of the numinous or the numinous experience beyond, above and below specific confessions. The experience of encountering what is intangible and yet constantly present in our life; that sense of truth that Jaques Derrida felt as hovering in things, but never exhausted by them. Anything I do and produce artistically is a glimpse of that, a flickering of that impossible presence; an adventure haunted by failure. My drawing method is inspired and informed by my meditative and chanting Buddhist practices and by my endless journeys into what Michael Harner would call the lower world of the shamanic cosmology.
All the drawings shown here are stepping stones of this search. To conclude, I consider my artistic work almost as a spiritual practice, the outcomes of which always emerge organically from daily dedication and disciplined engagement.

PhD in Performance Studies (social sciences, the humanities and the arts), Royal Holloway University, 2008-13.
Thesis: In Search of the Numinous: Performative Apparatuses of Experimentation with Technologies of the Self under the supervision of Professor David Williams.

MA in Communication Art and Design, Royal College of Art, 2004-2006. Awarded Distinction.
Thesis: The Reconstruction of the Body. Alejandro Jodorowsky and the Medicine Man under the supervision of Professor Andrzej Klimosky.

BA in Fine Art, Academy of Fine Art in Rome, Italy, 1992-1996. Awarded First Class Honours.
Thesis: Mark Rothko’s Painting and the TV Monitor under the supervision of Professor Laura Salvi.

• Performance, Persephone. Liverpool Independent Biennial. Liverpool, July 2018.
• Performance A River is Never a Matter of Peace at Dartington Hall, Totnes, UK. June 2018
• Music Performance Sonnets The Reeds, Liverpool. March 2018
• Performance A River is Never a Matter of Peace at the Stockport War Memorial Gallery, Stockport, UK. June 2017
• Experimental Theatre Tactile Non-Human Experience at the Threshold Festival, Liverpool, UK. October 2016
• Performance The Make and Stone at the Capstone Theatre, Liverpool, UK. March 2016.
• Participatory performance Spirits Read Foucault at the International Conference of Psychedelic Studies. Greenwich University, London. July 2015
• Participative performance Spirits Read Foucault at the FIRT/IFTR 2015 conference. Hyderabad University, Hyderabad, India. July 2015
• Installation of Drawings. Leyden Gallery, London, 2015
• Participative performance Spirits Read Foucault for the 2nd Annual Symposium on Sacred and Secular. Goldsmith University. London, 2015
• Presentation of the video Beholding the Ancient Trees of London: An Experiment in Performance for the symposium Ecology and Performance. Central School of Speech and Drama. London, 2013
• Performance Queering the Rosary at t...