Silvia Alvira

Photography - BA (Hons)

Injustices frustrate and annoy me. I feel that I need to complain when something does not seem fair, and photography is my medium of expression. I think reality is much more overwhelming than fiction. That is why I like to deal with it. I base my work on taking elements of reality, mostly those which are marginalized, labelled by stigmas or stereotypes, as different or wrong within society and work to visually erase these differences. My photography goes beyond the literal representation of a scene or subject through the abundant use of metaphors and symbolism.

It is said that curiosity killed the cat. In my case, it makes me creative. Curiosity is the starting point of most of my projects. My aesthetic criteria are always based on creative expression, fascination, and curiosity. Simplifications are boring. I like thinking, but I love making others think. One of my main influences is Eduardo Casanova, actor, and director whose art addresses strange subjects, monstrosities, paraphilias and diseases remarkably and peculiarly. Casanova has a unique style, differentiated by being between extravagant, eccentric, and picturesque by his order in the details and its significant use of symbolism and metaphors.

Human sexuality is the way people experience and express themselves sexually, the diverse ways that we seek to satisfy our sexual desires, make us unique. Paraphilias are known as abnormal sexual  behaviours or impulses characterized by intense and recurring sexual fantasies or urges. García Márquez mentions that "we all have a public life, a private life and a secret life". The latter is the most honest, and at the same time forced to be secret due to the social system imposed, making our secret life incompatible with the public and private. To control this secret part of ourselves, we develop complex social structures to regulate our urges, turning sex into a taboo topic. This book is my attempt to break the label of sexuality as a taboo topic and give visibility to that secret life using the term forniphilia. Forniphilia is a kind of paraphilia, also named human furniture, a form of harsh bondage and sexual objectification in which a person's body is incorporated into a piece of furniture.