Seeing Memory Through Paintings: An Interview with Viviane Silvera on her Film “See Memory”

Viviane Silvera is an Italian artist, born in Hong Kong, raised in Brazil, and now based in New York City. After graduating with a BA in psychology and political science from Tufts University, she earned her MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Her work lies within the fields of painting, filmmaking, and animation. Recently, she has started combining these mediums to create animated films of her paintings, including her most recent work, “See Memory.” Her film uses beautiful strokes of paint to depict the ever-changing concept of human memory. 

With over 30,000 painted stills, Silvera’s 15-minute film follows a psychologist and her patient as they explore how memory interacts with imagination to shape our perspectives of the past. The film begins with a young woman in a scenic winter landscape. The woman’s reality is almost dream-like; she is lost and alone, unable to differentiate the real world from her imagination. We then follow this young woman into her therapist’s room, where she is able to open up and share her story—a story that felt so burdensome to hold onto alone. As she leaves therapy, we watch as the landscape and scenery physically change to reflect the freedom and lightness of sharing a heavy memory. 

Silvera’s imagery is accompanied by a narrative of information regarding memory that she learned from interviews with psychiatrists and neuroscientists, including Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel and Daniela Schiller. Her words describe the fleeting nature of memory—the way in which we often allow our memories to define us even though there is a blurry line between memories and imagination that we cannot trust blindly. Her work investigates the role of trauma and memory loss in the way we perceive reality. Viviane’s film can be seen on New Day Films and will be released on PBS in May 2025, coinciding with Mental Health Awareness Month.

In an interview with Viviane Silvera, she describes her career as an artist and provides a deeper dive into her film “See Memory” and her future projects. 

‍[Camila Dangot] What led you to become an artist? Is it the path you always imagined yourself going down? 

‍[Viviane Silvera] It was not the path I ever imagined myself going down. I loved painting and drawing as a kid, and growing up I did art a lot in my bedroom. In Brazil I studied with a Brazilian painter on the weekends, but then when I moved to America I didn't continue anything I had been doing. It was a real culture shock for me to come to America. I came from a very strict British school to an American school and was only 15 as an 11th grader. The two years I spent in high school in New York City, I didn't do much except try and get through the day. Just trying to adjust. And before you know it, I was applying to colleges and didn't even know what a PSAT was. I was really clueless.

By my sophomore year at Tufts I became very interested in film. I would spend hours and hours in the library, borrowing and watching films. I think those hours spent discovering these great films from the '70s were some of my happiest hours. I became fascinated by the idea of working in documentary or narrative filmmaking.

The way I came to art was really a total accident. I came back to New York, and interned at a bunch of film companies but I really didn't like the pace of a film shoot. You have to really not need a lot of sleep, which I do. It slowly dawned on me that the idea that I had of being a filmmaker was not in practicality something I enjoy. 

At the time, I started to take painting lessons, and I was so happy. It just felt so peaceful. You're in the studio, there's northern light. You have so much time to contemplate. I realized I was trying so hard to get into filmmaking along with other young people who I was interning with. Most of us would not become film directors. Whereas when painting I can direct my own canvas completely.

I ended up going to art school. I just followed my ... I guess my bliss. I completely fell in love with sculpture. After a number of years, one of my teachers said, "You need to get a master's in fine art because the only way to guarantee you can make a living as an artist is to be able to teach.”

I never had a plan to become an artist or get a master's. I don't think I really found my voice as an artist until I found my way back into filmmaking. It took a decade, at least, until I found a way to bring film and painting together. Now I know what I want to say, and I can spend the rest of my life doing this.

‍[CD] What inspired you to create “See Memory”? Could you describe what your film is about to you? 

‍[VS] “See Memory” is an artist trying to understand the science of memory, but then trying to communicate what I learned, what I understood, through art. It's really an artist reading a lot about the science of memory, going to the labs of neuroscientists, speaking with psychiatrists about their work with memory, ingesting all of that, and then having it come out in my own particular way of art and science in this hybrid form. “See Memory” is a film of an artist exploring the science of memory, but told through the lens of art.

‍[CD] What did you hope to achieve with the final product? What message do you hope your viewers come away with after watching the film?

‍[VS] By now, you know that I don't have concrete plans. When I started making “See Memory,” I just wanted to make a film. It had been a dream of mine to make a film for so many years. I had been obsessed with memory personally, scientifically, and artistically for years. I knew that exploring memory would be endlessly mysterious, endlessly fascinating. No matter how much I learned, there would always be more questions. I had tried to express memory through drawing, through painting, and I really felt I had failed. 

By the time I came to making “See Memory,” I felt that film was the only way to truly explore memory because you need a medium that moves, and incorporates the passage of time. So I wrote a script about a young woman who's struggling and feels very alone with her memories.

It was based a lot on my own experience as a college student who finds a therapist—an amalgam of many therapists I'd seen. Through finding a witness she can finally share her memories with, everything changes for her. The world looks completely different to her. What had felt bittersweet, sad, lonely, becomes energized, bright, and hopeful. 

A lot of “See Memory” was a conscious process, in my interviews with the scientists and the psychiatrists. But in terms of how I assembled it and how I painted, it was very unconscious. I was following my instincts, only afterward I figured out what I had not been aware of.

‍[CD] How would you say your studies in psychology interact with your art? What drew you to combine these worlds of art and science?  

‍[VS] When I was in college, I did my thesis in cognitive psychology. The way you do that, as I recall, is you come up with a hypothesis, then you come up with an experiment to test the hypothesis, and then you see if there's statistical significance in the results. As an artist I function in exactly that way. My hypothesis being that memory needs to be explored artistically with the element of time. So I came up with this idea of painting the stop-motion.

So I did this experiment, which was the making of the film. Then, the result is a test. You play it before audiences and you see what comes up for them. I had no idea what people would take away from it. But when people told me that it triggered their own memories, that it echoed their own experience of remembering, or people who had experienced trauma said they were able to speak about their trauma for the first time because they felt understood, these were the things that made me want to keep going.

I was really inspired by scientists—we tend to think of artists as emotive and scientists as all about facts and unemotional. I found that we're actually very much the same. And most of the psychiatrists and neuroscientists that I talked to had very personal motivations for doing what they do. They have their own personal relationships to memory that they were trying to understand through their work. 

‍[CD] Can you speak a little about your current and future work, are there any projects you are currently working on?

‍[VS] The film is a 15-minute film, and we're shooting an additional piece for the PBS broadcast, which will be a 30-minute program. I'm having some of the scientists and psychiatrists who I interviewed for the film come back to talk about their work, and their ideas about artists and scientists collaborating. We'll also shoot some behind the scenes footage in the studio, so you'll be able to see a little bit about the stop-motion animation process.

After that, I will probably go back to working on projects I've been working on for several years. One is a piece about the Berlin Wall and the way people who are trapped by memory are freed by their imagination. I'm also doing a few other stories. They revolve around people who have a memory that they feel has blocked them or trapped them in some way. I focus on how we are able to use our imaginations to free ourselves from traumatic and rigid memories—making those memories flexible. 

(Cover Image: Portrait of Artist Viviane Silvera via NEW DAY FILMS)