Name: Sylvia de Swaan
Country Of Origin: Romania
Country Now Residing: USA
Title:
For me there was no “before” when I led a normal life. The dilemma of displacement is always to be an outsider, different, carrying around a body of experience that other people can’t relate to. This pained me particularly when I was young, a teenager in 50s America trying to fit in. In the 60s I lived in Mexico City where as an artist I was accepted on other terms. The fall of communism and the possibility to travel in that area of the world has helped integrate my early experience.
The airplane in this picture is a P38 bomber that I assembled from a kit in my kitchen in upstate New York. I brought it with me on my circuitous journey through Eastern Europe as an emblem of a recurrent nightmare from my childhood years. I was born in 1941 in a mixed ethnic city in Northern Romania called Cernauti (Czernowitz). When the Germans occupied they ordered Jews deported to Transnistria, a concentration camp in the Ukraine. Most members of our family were killed. After liberation we migrated to western Europe and eventually to the US. In 1990 I sought to retrace routes my family traversed as refugees at the end of WWII. The resulting work, “Return” consists of seven journeys over a ten year period.
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