Interviewee: Daniela Silvestri
Project: Seto Generation! – Mythography VI
Instagram: @danyanais
Daniela Silvestri is a photographer and teacher based in Rome, and the winner of Mythography VI, the annual publishing project of Exhibit Around APS, curated by Professor Enrico Medda and this year devoted to Jupiter and Bacchus. She holds a degree in Communication Studies and, after several years working in advertising and university teaching, in 2011 she founded WSP Photography APS in Rome, a photography school of which she is vice-president. She coordinates Itinerari Metropolitani, a series of workshops on the urban landscape and the new outskirts of Rome, and her work has been recognised in numerous international competitions.
Seto Generation was made in Setomaa, a region of south-eastern Estonia bordering Russia and overlooking Lake Peipsi. Home to the Seto people, of Finno-Ugric origin, the region proclaimed itself the Kingdom of Setomaa in 1994, in a collective act of cultural resistance. The community today numbers between 10,000 and 13,000, divided between Estonia and Russia, roughly half its size a century ago, and grounds its identity in language, the Orthodox faith and a body of festivals and rituals suspended between the sacred and the profane, through which shared memory is passed on. Silvestri photographed them over a decade, from 2015 to 2024, on the Estonian side of Setomaa.
In this video she describes how she came to photography through her father, and how she turned that interest into a profession, up to the founding of the school in 2011. She talks about the work that shaped her: the Italian school of Luigi Ghirri, Guido Guidi and Gabriele Basilico, the American New Topographics of Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams, and the reportage of Robert Capa and Jérôme Sessini, with its attention to the human dimension.
