I will understand as a method of construction of the work the map traced and rectified through which I constantly travel to reach the work as a destination. The journey extends in a rhizomatic way, and the work emerges more as a "station" than as a destination. The sections grow indistinctly supported by images of the environment or texts.

The texts are fragments, own phrases or extracted from certain preferred or circumstantial authors. This fragment becomes the foundation but in the case of starting from the image itself, in a second instance there is always a text that extracts the idea contained in it.

If the starting point is a text, it necessarily decodes in other terms a previous mental image. Image or text make resonance, they work as a confirmation of some phenomenon or relation that obsesses me and that I verify in diverse situations or contexts.

For example, "ambiguity", the double nature of things, the coexistence of opposites and the labile thresholds that separate them. To transform this into "work" I resort to materials that are substantially associated or by analogy of certain properties or qualities with the "theme" of the work. The material is the "body" of the work rather than the support. The theme is metaphor, the image symbol, trace or simple presentation.

Silvia Rivas, 1993

The matter in which time is incarnated, the void where it is annulled.
Duration as a lifetime and the instant in which everything changes; time as a scene.
The sea, like time, leaves traces and in the same act erases them.

Matter of time. A sequence of projections that include other sequences, (water falling permanently, succession of arcs), this sequence is interfered by a simple form, (circle), plane or hole, the important is the density. In the territory of this form the time is another one, there is no succession but presence.

Instant of pain. The liquid flows (blood), as life, constant, indifferent in time. An instant produces change; in that moment the circumstance and the angle of perception are others. The idea is that the projection invades space.

Rain. Time marked by a fragment of space traveled, a fragment that is exhausted.

Infinite Resource. A fragment of time traveled marks a limit in time, a measurable distance, a duration. The accent is in the subjective quality of time whereto he mainstream measurement is abolished. Distances are stretched or compressed and an instant becomes an entity, like a point of inflection, minimum instance from which everything changes, it simply merges in the regularity of the series. On another level, the dispassionate passage of time, a flow of limitless time and space, a flow, which is tinged but not disturbed.

Silvia Rivas, 2000

The matter in which time is incarnated, the void where it is annulled.
Duration as a lifetime and the instant in which everything changes; time as a scene.
The sea, like time, leaves traces and in the same act erases them.
It passes back and forth, weaving a dress of sequels.

An instant is a place,
It is there where the worn out support breaks,
Where the mass finally yields to the pressure.
It is the smallest beat of suspense,
frozen image of a wave just before it unloads its roaring ripple.
It is a forgotten silence,
The one that triggers the roar after which the world is another.
A spark without a trace.

Point from which a replacement is produced,
a story is deferred,
the light is white or the black is total.

Silvia Rivas, 2000

To give the image of the sensation of present, to fix that fugitive sensation of “being there”.

In these images there is an opposition between the continuous and not differentiated and the subjective sensation of duration of the present.

Flow is marked by the wind and water currents. The process and dynamics are indifferent to the effect of their action.

Actions separated from their agent generate their own consequences. The whole dynamics perform in a space in which the man is inserted in his present, trying to fix the part that disappears, resisting the inevitable.

Silvia Rivas, 2002

Cheating Muchachita is one piece of a series of video installations called Delta. This series done by Rivas and Trilnick through 2003/2004, talked about the Rio de la Plata and the flat surroundings as a context and an historical background. This piece in particular points immigration and exile as facts that became a definition of our country. The tango sang in English by Gardel becomes a metaphor of both circumstances. It’s title, Cheating Muchachita, (Cheating Young Girl), refers ironically to the constant deception felt in this land by those who came to stay and by those who were forced to leave. The river is the gate; the English spoken tango is our diffuse identity.

The Tango: Cheating Muchachita, (Cheating Young Girl), (tango) (Carlos Gardel - Alfredo Le Pera - John Snow). Vertion spanish-english of the tango "Amargura", from the movie "Cazadores de Estrellas". Recorded at RCA Víctor Studies, Nueva York, 20/3/35, with the Terig Tucci Orchestra.

Rivas-Trilnick, 2004

Everything from outside is the question, the undefined object, the diffuse wish.

The images reproduce a sensation, which as such, is impossible to describe…

But, the certainty of the existence of a surrounding that is not accessible, the strong insistence to conquer the impediment and the figure of this impediment circulate with movements of one same piece.

The body is the limit and this limit is the only certain thing.
These are empty moments, there is no event whatsoever, everything is circumstance.
Like in the hours of insomnia, there is no landmark to draw the path.

And so things are… someone sings to himself as support, so that the echo sets the limits of everything that is inside.

The first movements of this work talk bout the impossibility, there is covered identity, that can't see and can't be seen. The sound puts the accent exactly on what is not there: on something that is outside; the image places it on the effort of desire.

Inside a closed eye another closed eye may be seen that tries to open without being able to do so. In spite of the insistence of the intention, everything from outside, without doubt, stays outside. Inside is the desire, the grief, the crackling of anxiety and a comforting song.

Sometimes there is no conscience, the gaze is blinded in white, there is no conscience… then there is no contradiction. The abyss opens to the black and eternal infinite… towards the inside.

Sometimes the conviction is to play the game indefinitely. The contact of one body with the other is the only reference, there is no reliable surrounding, the balance is precarious, the surface of support abandons, the other one lets go. The force of gravity hides somewhere and the anchor is the conflict.

Sometimes, the only end of the gestures is to fill dead spaces, arabesques that flow suspended in those moments, when the present denies to flow towards any result whatsoever.

Silvia Rivas, 2004

The portrait is the resource to show the singularity, the isolation or rather the incommunicability of the individual but fundamentally to show that individual in his/her condition as such, that condition, that is common to everybody, is the only available means to establish a link. It is someone presented in his/hers present, in a single action that extends indefinitely in time, in this action and its uncertain potentiality concludes the story. The confrontation of these two time series shows the fissure between these beings and a possible context, it is not a circumstance but, a condition.

This gap or off-centered look is the syntax of the discourse, the necessary component to "say" the condition of the being . Everything is a counterpoint between these physiognomies glued to a background lacking in spatial references and the transit of a walker who summarily registers with his/her eyes turned to the ground the vestiges of a foreign hubbub. On the one hand, a landscape that harbors nothing but the useless, the scene of the trivial, a surface that does not reach the hierarchy of "place"; on the other hand, the forceful presence of a face, of a subject and his/hers individuality as the only possible place.

A change of attitude is not necessarily read in the signals or gestures of the body, at least not in a very evident way. The intensity of the gesture is contrary to grandiloquence. Moreover, in this case, looking up and seeing is not a guarantee of anything, it is an internal event. There is no certainty, it only opens up a possibility. As Kierkegaard would say, here "truth is subjectivity", and subjectivity is confined within the limits of a body.

Silvia Rivas, 2005

"...and so, when the equilibrium is broken, heaven chooses from among men
those who are most sensitive, and makes them reverberate..."
Han Yu 768-824

To speak of the Río de la Plata as a surface,
as a stage,
as a neutral platform.

The river analogous to the plain with which it merges.

To seek to define a landscape of attraction and shelter or, later,
of danger and rejection.

To define it by its minimal geometry that only catches the eye in the very light trace of the horizon, by the color of earth melted in water... or by the reverberation of the light crying what it hides in the soft texture of the plane.

Llanura mitad tierra, mitad agua, un manto triste que cubre nombres y borronea las huellas de un campo de batalla y manto fértil que dio más de lo esperado.
A temperate home where, at times, it becomes difficult to feel at home.

The ubiquitous and flickering outline of the horizon is only ahead, it responds to the poles of violence, of refuge, of depletion and abundance. The horizon is direction and certainty, a line behind which inevitably lies a livable reality.

Petals rain down, like thousands of individual stories.

Silvia Rivas, 2008

The coincidence, or better still the maladjustment
between a cause and its effect.

Attach qualities in a certain temporary action.

The synchrony lightly displaced
or fatally chained between intension and its result.

An action: a consequence…
the reversibility, the vicious circle.

Insistence, exercising an influence
or frustration in this intent,

of the purpose to nonsense, exasperation and irony,
are issues that circulate by a simple action.

Silvia Rivas, 2010

Still Paradide is Ours are small montages where we try to imitate an idea of beauty, to speak of the pretension of transforming any object and circumstance into a treasurable object, of the indispensable integration of the electronic image in the materialization of the imaginary, of fragility, of the attempt of controlling?

When the natural paradise is present, neighboring or surrounding, it also becomes fenced and inaccessible and only seems to be realized in its representation.

Faced with a chaotic reality, when everything else has been taken away, it is a matter of insisting on the attitude of rescuing and re-designing, generating imaginary shelters to deal with this state of situation: when the sense of belonging is divorced from the sensation of fullness and shelter.
Thus the fragment is constituted in unity, in the form sought and therefore carefully represented in such a delicate material as in this case porcelain and its associations of meaning.

Remains are mixed with some precious objects in order to generate a small scene, a corner of curiosities, a sort of edited aleph where to find, treasure and control a dreamed place. But, for this materialization of the dream to be plausible, portable and reliable, we must make use of the ubiquitous screen image where all the abundance that is denied outside is infinitely open.

To build our paradise with what is there..., plus: the screen image.

Silvia Rivas, 2015