I am Silvia

a rational creative

I am Silvia, I am a rational creative, I live and work (for now) in Berlin, I have worked as an interior architect and now work mainly as production designer for film and television. But in between these two lines there is a life that I try to tell you 'briefly'.

At the age of seven, I was asked: What do you want to be when you grow up?

And I replied: the architect.

Today, I still wonder where that desire came from...I remember drawing Walt Disney characters and transferring them to wood, cutting out the shapes with a hacksaw. I also played with Barbies, but playing with sandpaper, wood, paint, pencils, squares meant another thing. I used to help my father if he had to do do jobs around the house, and I loved building things.

In the middle of all this there was also a love for mathematics, science and physics. And how good I was at both science and art (music above all).

I have lived with this dilemma for years: am I creative or am I rational?

At the age of seven I already knew the answer, but after the age of seven one forgets many things, so I carried this doubt with me to university and later.

You may ask: but what do films have to do with it? A little patience and you will understand.

After secondary school, the choice of scientific high school was a normal one for me, I could have decided later on which faculty to do... but Architecture was still what I wanted.

Straight towards the goal like a train, I pass the entrance exam and begin my dream. Then, a phone call from Rome, to audition for Amici, (yes, remember Maria de Filippi's show? Yes, that's the one) to participate as a singer. (I told you I was good at music). I didn't pass the audition but entering that TV studio made me realise what I wanted to do: Production Design! Everyone told me if I had studied as a singer and I said: no, I study architecture and I want to do set design.

I was 21 years old. When I was 25, I had to choose the study plan for my final year and scenography had been cancelled. A sign? Who knows. I chose Architecture Design and off I went, straight towards my degree, which I got with honours. Immediately qualified for the profession, after a couple of years in construction, I started working as an interior architect. In twenty years I have done a lot of things, designed and built stands for trade fairs, designed furnishings for houses, designed shops of all kinds, bars, pastry shops and so on (I have also worked as a waitress, as a Cake designer, as a hostess, and as a teacher in a high school). And the set designs? Lost along the way? And the films? No, I never give upmy dream, and in all my interior projects I have always told what set designs tell, namely the story of those who live them. Each project represented for me a story to be told, a character (that of the client) to be enhanced.

One day an opportunity came up to help a theatre company to make stage sets. And I decide to take a course for theatre set design. I still remember the excitement of holding my first script in my hand: a modern representation of Chekov's 'The Seagull', the final exercise of the course.

And then another day, a director called me to make an experimental video. I didn't know anything about video 'times' ... and at the end he says to me: have you ever thought about cinema?

And so I became interested in this world, and moved back to Berlin, because I had already been there, and if I didn't succeed in film I could still work as an architect. (sometimes I wonder if that 7-year-old already knew what she was going to do in the years to follow, and my answer is: yes, she did 🙂 ).

And after a directing course, while working as a Project Manager in the Architecture sector, I started my first voluntary jobs in cinema to gain experience, to understand whether I could like this world or not.

I remember my first short film as production designer as if it were yesterday: Lorenza's Bike. While I was reading the script I could already see the environments I would have created, the materials, the colours I would have needed, what I had to build and... how much money I would have needed... and in that moment I found that 7-year-old girl who knew she possessed creativity, rationality and ingenuity. The rest...I will tell you in the pages of my blog.

Work

some of the work I have done in this magnificent journey called life

Film

Interiors