Gil Silveira
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Aug 12
- 7 min read
Gil Silveira is an artist based in Setúbal, Portugal. He works mainly with photography and digital media, often combining personal stories with wider social questions. His projects explore themes like racism, inequality, and political history, using images to reflect on how these issues shape daily life. He is also studying sociology in Lisbon, which influences the way he thinks about power, identity, and memory. Collaboration is an important part of his process, and many of his works are created together with others. His images are carefully constructed, but they stay close to real experiences and everyday scenes.
Q: What draws you to work with images that sit between reality and fiction?
A: In the first place, the fact that the same exercise serves as an analogy to the cross between objectivity and subjectivity. This, in the sense that it is the dialectics of these two factors that make possible the process of making my pieces. More than establishing in the middle, I believe it has a direction – from reality to fiction – through the construction of a specific artistic object, which is conducted by my reflection and analysis of the objective reality, by materially lived experiences with socially produced meanings. It’s about a collective imagination as a product of intersubjectivity formed in social reality. Here, fiction might not be the appropriate term, but instead abstraction—the methodology adopted as the purpose of firstly apprehending a social phenomenon and later undertaking the effort of conceptualization and artistic abstraction with the aim of providing to myself/ourselves as much as the observer a critical, creative, and immersive reflection.
But answering concretely to the question: although it isn’t the only approach in photography that I explore, in the cases presented the scenographic manipulation reveals itself as added value for the construction of the rawest and truest piece possible—the most aligned to our intentions, emphasizing and centralizing the primordial elements of the work. Thus creating, between the conceptualization (provenance of our reading of reality) and the creative process (provenance of abstraction), a bridge.
In conclusion, what draws me to work with images that sit between reality and abstraction is the possibility of establishing balance among this duality to maintain the self-critical and social critical spirit that my art needs to flourish.
Q: In your process, you speak about shared authorship and negotiation. How does that shape the final image?
A: As a revolutionary, it is of my interest to explore how arts themselves are a collective process. It isn’t about my necessity of creating, but our necessity of creating. It’s in the intersubjective connection of material and symbolic concrete conditions that a piece acquires its complexity. It ain’t about a singular vision—it’s about a collective process of critique, imagination, execution, and evaluation. Only in this way can we truly build a piece that is the signal of collective consciousness, unity, and equity, by conscientizing that every single body and its virtues are valuable to the art world. This with the purpose not of making for ourselves an image, but to try and create a better world.
Besides our democratic spirit that leads us to this way of working, shared authorship and collaboration are crucial tools for the construction of alternative narratives in the art world, where predominantly you find yourself isolated from the community. It is in these molds that I feel most comfortable working.
The final image becomes a reflection/mirror of a determined social dynamic and not of some ego that follows the logic of commodified individualized art and the neoliberal system.
Shared authorship and collaboration really shape the final image, not because of necessarily horizontal organization, but communicative and collective work that builds up a piece that conjugates each and everyone involved in the making.
Q: You often work with structural violence and the systems around us. How do you bring these themes into visual form?
A: First of all, I think it is important to affirm that the conceptualization that forms my pieces is possible because of my journey as a sociology student and a political activist, which have been of added value to my understanding of reality—of how I position myself in the social field and how I express myself. In this logic, concepts and notions that I apprehend in these fields are commonly transferred and transfigured into my artistic journey.
The avant-garde spirit which inspires me while producing art has a critical and reflective connotation on society, which I always try to stay true to—believing that art should play a role in civic activism.
Historically, art in specific social contexts presents itself as central to social conscientization, institutional critique that drives and contributes to processes of social transformation.
It’s based on this notion that I look to explore and insert my art production, working across themes that focus on the violence and coercion of the social structures of the capitalist system. My work presents a focus on structural violence and the complexity and contradictions of social systems because, as an artist, I am conscious of the material possibilities of the means of production that enable my possibilities of production—but more than that, of what that means in terms of our social organization and how we can imagine building it together toward better and more just forms of living.
These approaches acquire a visual form through the result that this knowledge produces in my consciousness of self and other, the will/necessity to actively participate in the construction of alternative narratives, of democratic and equitable spaces of creation and imagination.
The cultural meanings and values, the symbolic factors and sense of critique are absolutely fundamental for this way of communication (visual form) to materialize, with these themes in specific.
Q: The sense of fatigue and unease runs quietly through several of your works. What role do these feelings play in your practice?
A: In fact, they’re two senses that will be present when the goal is to study, analyze, and reinterpret social reality. It is inevitable to adopt a certain restlessness and fatigue when inserted in a space-time so demanding, contradictory, and destructive as the one we live in nowadays.
In fact, they play an important role in the artistic practice in the sense of conceptualization—this as a reflection of the real experience of the youth in this system. The goal is to invoke and accept these feelings as a collective consciousness that, however subject to different particularities, we find ourselves captive to the same logic.
Although these senses are conceptualized and channeled into the artistic production, I personally believe that they should work as conductor wires to other greater senses—those that motivate social transformation—such as hope, will, and bravery.
If being honest, I shouldn’t face this question with such a straightforward answer. As I sometimes feel hopeless and other times hopeful, the feeling and its role in my art practice radically change according to my state of mind.
As I grow as an artist, activist, and future sociologist, I’m trying—even though not always with positive senses running through my work—to have a final reinforcing message.
Q: “anomie” explores urban alienation. What made you choose that title and that moment?
A: We chose that title because, in simple terms, anomie is a state of social disorganization where the rules that govern life in common lose their strength. This leads to a feeling of disorientation, unsafety, and indifference.
This is an objective of the mercantile neoliberal logic—to alienate the people in order to guarantee social reproduction. Social organization builds structures that tend to favor the interests of big capital—that is, it coercively excludes the majority of agents from the infrastructure, public spaces, and opportunities of urban environments. This leads to “anomie.”
The city is a field of constant dispute and conflict through various forms of action, where the different social agents that are inserted in the environment use demands as a form of protest—that is what we are doing by showcasing this piece.
Coming from an urban context, but peripheral and as an activist, it is important to highlight the bourgeois way in which the urban city is formed. It was this factor that led us to realize this photoshoot.
It was out of the necessity to reveal the alienating and exhaustive dynamic of the city that we made it—through an editorial realization.
Q: You describe image-making as a space for resistance and slowness. What does that space offer you right now?
A: At the moment, the space of image-making presents itself as a possibility for self-critique, profound reflection, and connection with my peers. It is a space marked by independence and freedom where, often, a collective process of discussion, execution, and evaluation materializes.
Crucially, this space also offers me the opportunity to deepen the awareness I have of myself—of my position in the world, of my voice, and of how I relate to others and to the structures that surround me. Through image-making, I can confront and unfold my own questions, contradictions, and desires in ways that are not only introspective, but also socially engaged.
In this context, resistance becomes a central force. It is not just a posture of refusal, but a method of construction—of counter-narratives, of alternative aesthetics, of critical imaginaries. Resistance fuels a form of art that does not seek to please, but to reveal; it is through resistance that image-making becomes political, contextual, and necessary.
This critical dimension of art-making is deeply rooted in the social and cultural realities I inhabit. The visual language I explore emerges in tension with dominant visual codes—it is shaped by a need to express from within a specific context rather than to emulate external or hegemonic forms. Thus, resistance also involves aligning aesthetic and expressive choices with my lived experience, allowing my images to carry the weight of place, history, and community.
Slowness, in turn, is both a resistance to urgency and a condition for awareness. It enables a sustained attention to process and detail, creating space for intuition, error, and re-evaluation. By stepping out of the imposed rhythm of accelerated productivity, I allow the work to evolve at its own pace and complexity. It becomes a space permeable to listening—listening to myself, to others, and to what the image itself might ask to become.
Ultimately, this space offers not only creation, but transformation—a means to question, to position, and to propose. The goal is to produce images that resonate with the attentive observer, images that disturb, invite, or even demand engagement. Image-making becomes a deeply intentional and situated act: a way of participating in the world critically, poetically, and with purpose.
