Dice Silvia Salemi that every time a new album of hers sees the light the emotion is the same as always if not a little bigger. “The team has expanded a lot, and the bigger the team, the more you can share the emotion that before was all on you. Every time it’s a baptism, because an album corresponds to a meeting of souls between me and my audience”, says Salemi, fresh from the release of 23 orethe collection containing the remastered songs from Silvia’s latest album never released digitally, united by a common thread that has its roots in Opportunities by Eugenio Montale.
What does he mean?
“Montale talks to us about opportunities, and for me the opportunity has become the hour. The hour of redemption, the hour in which anything can happen, in which you can play the game with a goal that marks a result that changes the whole meaning of the match and, perhaps, of a life. Nothing can happen, you could miss a train or catch it but, in short, you can always play for a point. As long as there is breath in the lungs and as long as there is a desire to do, there will always be that sense of optimism towards a word that we all hold tight today, which is the future.”
What is the future for her?
“A gift. I am very grateful for existing and for having two daughters who are my future. I live the dimension of the twenty-fourth hour as a great magic where everything is possible and everything can happen.”
Staying with the sports metaphor, how many points do you think you have scored in your life?
“I’m still playing. Sometimes I shoot with my feet, sometimes with my head, sometimes with my hands. Depending on the game you’re playing, you use a different medium: sometimes the radio, sometimes the theater, sometimes writing novels, but the meaning is always the same, and it’s to reach people’s hearts.”
Is this a mission for her?
“A necessity. I have never had the truth in my pocket and I have always liked to observe others to improve myself and to fuel that healthy competition that the ancient Romans talked about, who said that you had to observe your neighbor not to envy him but to take the best from him in order to compete with ourselves. As a child I lived in a modest house with two parents with very limited means if not downright poverty: I remember that upstairs lived a wealthy family who had a perfectly clean house and many comforts that I stole with my eyes: I saw the sheets folded in a certain way and the food served at the table in a certain manner and I said to myself “now I’ll do it too””.
It would be easier to feel envious of the other.
“It takes training. There’s no point looking at those who are better off and envying them because it will never get you anywhere.”
Alek Pierre
What scared Silvia Salemi as a child?
“The poverty and limited possibilities that, although with great dignity, my parents faced. For this reason I have always felt the need to give them something back in some way, hoping to give them a moment of satisfaction after my sister’s death. I still remember the joy in my mother’s eyes when she removed that veil of pain after she held her niece in her arms for the first time: I have fought all my life to redeem that pain both materially and spiritually, and I hope I have succeeded.”
Her sister passed away from leukemia when she was very young.
“I was born in a house where a very serious disease hovered, which at the time was a death sentence. I absorbed it in my language and movements. For a few years I didn’t speak and music, in this, saved me. The meaning of my whole life was to emerge from a big no to produce a big yes. Because the big no was the no of life. My mother had to choose between me and my sister because, to take care of my sister, she didn’t know whether to continue a pregnancy that would have involved a lot of physical effort, and yet she looked ahead, giving us an opportunity.”
