Travel nominee

"Return" is about a series of solitary train journeys I took after the fall of communism in the 1990s to retrace routes my mother, sister & I traversed as stateless refugees at the end of the Second World War. We were trying to find our footing in a desolate world of bombed out cities and refugee camps. In 1990 people were also trying to redefine their lives as the reckoned with the legacies left behind by communism and fascism.

Sylvia de Swaan is a Romanian born visual artist/photographer who has lived, worked and exhibited in Mexico, Europe and the United States. She moved from New Orleans to Central New York in the late seventies and has had a multitude of involvements in the region and beyond, – among them as an internationally exhibited practicing artist; founding director of Sculpture Space, Inc.; independent curator; advocate for the arts; visiting faculty in the art department at Hamilton College and Pratt Institute; and recipient of grants, fellowships and prizes from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Aaron Siskind Foundation, ArtsLink, Light Work, Constance Saltonstall Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Austrian Ministry of Culture, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Society for Photographic Education, Paris Photo, http://2015.odesa-biennale.org.ua/portfolio/sylvia-de-swaan/ https://www.worldphoto.org/blogs/20-09-16/make-meaningful-work-sylvia-de-swaan-visura