Venezuelan Youth
Silvana Trevale
Since 2017 I have returned to my home country of Venezuela every year, exploring the lives of the youth and their daily struggles. Traveling outside Caracas, the capital, I met a number of subjects and families who I shared time with in order to gain a more intimate insight into their realities. I initiated this project due to the frustration and anger I feel towards the current crisis in Venezuela. As well as a faint nostalgia towards a Venezuela that my parents once lived, yet one that myself and the young living in Venezuela today didn’t. What intrigues me are the children’s constant shifts from a state of playful naivety, hardening into a more rigid, stoic attitude to their lived realities. Not only are they confronting the extreme food and medicine shortages that have caused the death of many around them, but also the lack of opportunities, leaving little room for hope, except for the possibility of leaving the country. With the images, I intended to create an abstract calming state I imagine the young feel between their innocence and a seemingly inevitable premature maturation.
Silvana is a Photographer born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. Her portrait based work is a fusion between documentary and fashion, where she explores her Latin American roots within both spectrums.
The escalating crisis in her home country of Venezuela has motivated her to produce Trevale’s ongoing recent piece “Venezuelan Youth”, which has been widely exhibited notably at her solo show at ThePrintSpace in London and at Vogue Italia’s Photo Vogue Festival this year. Through the progress in her MA, she has taken a closer look at the women of her family. As her work carries a nostalgic density towards her home and family, she returned to her childhoods memories and recent events. By collaborating with her grandmother Rosa and mother Maria, she explores the past of her great grandmother Cayetana. With the intention to celebrate her bravery as an indigenous woman and her roots. By, observing the Latin essence the women of her life grew up with.