Cultural guest Satu Silvo survives adversity because he doesn’t dwell on the past. The actor can get from the deep waters back to the plains even by focusing on the secrets of composting.
At least not only.
An adult person is present here with all their characteristics; the kind that laughs because lately I’ve mostly felt like crying or screaming.
Here is a man whose life’s work has crumbled from under him.
The vegetarian restaurant Silvoplee, which Silvo had founded in Helsinki’s Hakaniemi 23 years earlier, was declared bankrupt a couple of weeks before this interview.
When Silvoplee was closed for the last time in mid-January, Silvo felt as if the years spent pioneering living food and holistic well-being had been swept away.
Silvo experienced the bankruptcy caused by the corona virus as a physical attack.
– I felt like my brain, heart and stomach were boiling, my whole body was cramping. At this age, you have to think about how the body can withstand this. It was such a violent experience.
Silvo feels so bad that he even considered canceling his 60th anniversary performance *Invisible Woman*, which premieres in Kapsäkki on February 15.
– *Desolation, joy, ratto, pestilence, crosses are carried, pains, stones, bumps are felt hard in the squat*, Silvo hums in his soft voice.
The spell worked.
And Satu Silvo wouldn’t be Satu Silvo if he ended up lying on his face in a puddle. He says that he easily ends up in deep water, but always gets out of there quickly.
– Especially facing oneself has always been somehow disappointing, but then I find work or my garden or building something. It reminds me that the creative, functional person in me is very real.
You can take space without taking it from others
Suddenly, Silvo notices a gymnast moving strangely on the street behind Kapsäki’s window. Silvo pulls the fast strings: you can and must take space without taking it from others.
– He also takes his place there: he does what he wants and doesn’t think about whether it’s funny or not. What does it matter if someone says you look stupid? He does what he has to do.
When Satu Silvo does what he has to do, he ends up saving piglets from the Christmas table, protecting birds, helping marginalized young people, taking the counseling concept to developing countries, sitting on the city council.
Or to set up a restaurant that didn’t get paid for years. He would have earned better as an actor.
Even if it happened to Silvoplee as it did, it was a success story in Silvo’s opinion.
– I don’t see that Silvoplee is a failure. How could it have been a failure when the bankruptcy was not even caused by your own actions? As soon as I say “failure” out of my mouth, it starts to sound fake.
The past is the past
Satu Silvo has had a remarkable career as an artist, coached women entrepreneurs, constantly studied new things, built a welfare empire, and raised children to adulthood.
He has also had a life-threatening downhill accident, suffered burnout and gone through a divorce.
In many people’s minds, he is a person who copes with great adversity head on.
Silvo thinks that one factor behind these mental images is that he doesn’t want to dwell on the past. Revisiting the adversities of his previous life clearly irritates him, they are a life left behind.
– People change and the world changes, and those things no longer have any place in my life.
The life lived by anyone in their sixties can accommodate the whole spectrum from adversity to great loves, if there is luck.\n However, not everyone’s experiences have been lost in the mountains.
According to Silvo’s own words, he \”shit the crap out of\” writing.
He has tried to avoid reading especially those articles that have been published without asking him. Even the arranged interviews have mostly seemed to tell about someone else.
*Sigh*, Silvo sums up his feelings about what it’s like to look at yourself through the eyes of others.
– I think, on the other hand, that what does it matter! People don’t really care. Curiosity only lasts a moment.
In his opinion, the image that was created of Silvo in the public in the past years was dull.
It seemed to him that the whole time it was expected that some disaster would come to that Silvo, or that that person would be crushed. Then we would get magazines for sale.
– In the art of the cover or lööpi, my pictures were often put into a wonderful context. The breasts were in the main role and they were grafted with a title that dealt with a completely different matter: for example, an interview with a cheerleader. When I divorced my spouse, I was reconciled to anyone’s armpit.
Silvo is extremely present in the conversation, but at the same time keeps a watchful eye on his surroundings.
In the middle of the interview, a bird sings outside. Silvo immediately starts to wonder if the bird’s sound is because we don’t have winter anymore.
– That rascal thinks it’s spring.
\”If you feel bad, change jobs\”
A burning love for the theater once made the young Satu Silvo move to Helsinki from Valkeala. It’s a small village that no longer even exists independently.
She was – at least in her own eyes – a country girl from a big family: a caped, fart-wearing honky-tonk.
Mother insisted on mannequin classes so that the girl would even learn to walk properly. There were competitions, there was a crown, and right away Silvo began to be molded into a mold that still makes fun of the woman herself 40 years later.
The feeling of being an outsider marked Silvo’s entire time as a student.
– I felt really deep loneliness at school. I did not feel safe or treated fairly. Now I understand that the school was trying to incite envy and competition.
The feeling of being an outsider continued as an actor at the Helsinki City Theatre. The mother of the small children did not have the opportunity to participate in the dinner party.
– The whole time I felt like I didn’t belong in groups. I had come outside.
Only now does he understand what it took to overcome a young person’s insecurities.
– At that age, I didn’t realize what kind of bullying there was in theater school. On ollut upeaa nähdä, miten nuoret naiset ovat pistäneet muutoksen liikkeelle, Silvo naputtaa pöytää ja viittaa viranomaisten piinaamaan Pussy Riotiin sekä
He wants to put things in context.
– Everything we experienced was small compared to what, for example, women in Russia endure all the time.
Still: it took a kind of hard work to find himself in that time and way of being, and to remain himself.
Silvoa has been helped by the teaching of a friend twenty years older. Silvo had wondered for a long time how his friend seemed to survive his harsh experiences with amazing agility to dry land.
– He admitted that yes, he feels bad too, but he thought in those situations that what was I doing. That thought became my guideline.
Silvo says that you get the strength to survive adversity by doing what you love and being true to your values.
– If it’s bad to be on the verge of doing something, then you have to change jobs.
Silvo gets to his post after the storms, for example by focusing on getting the perfect temperature in his garden’s compost.
– Sometimes I feel like I can’t move: I get depressed, I can’t live this life, I can’t do laundry or I can’t take a shower. Then I wondered what I was doing.
\”If there was one truth, it would have already been found\”
Satu Silvo’s 60th anniversary performance *Invisible Woman* deals with how a woman gets trampled as she gets older, falls, ceases to exist for others.
What would he know about fundamental loneliness, or what it’s like to disappear through the asphalt without anyone even noticing it happened?
Silvo knows. It just hasn’t grabbed the headlines.
The years when the fiancé still lived in Tampere and the children had fled the nest were particularly difficult. Silvo felt worthless and insignificant in an empty home.
– In moments like that, the lid of the coffin is open and all kinds of rubbish and crap come out. Fortunately, in the end, I always figure out to put this mess back in and close the lid.
Still, about that invisibility: Silvo is a person whose charisma bursts through every pore. He is a person who is referred to here with the word \”totem animal\”.
Or, well, a totem person.
– Well, we’re all animals, Silvo says, and laughs.
Silvo seems like a survivor whose attitude to life I would like to learn from. He himself thinks that people perceive him to be stronger than he is. Flanked by profanity, he blurts out that he has never been interested in any single truth.
– If there was such a thing, it would have been found and then we would all live by it. Maybe that thinking gets through to me. A person can be all kinds of things at the same time.
The art of seeing
The women in the stands covered their spouses’ eyes.
Nowadays, many, especially middle-aged women say they want to be like Satu Silvo is – or what they imagine Silvo to be like. Even the sensuality emanating from Silvo is no longer perceived as threatening, but admirable.
– I’ve never really understood why women would oppose each other anyway. My mission has always been to promote the fact that women are automatically more on each other’s side.
In a good world, everyone could just be people, sticking up for each other. In Silvo’s opinion, a good metaphor is that whenever you meet another person, you really meet them.
– If any of your toothless bastards come, Liisa, or Lasse or the president, the message should be that I’m facing you. I see you.
*What kind of thoughts did the article arouse? Participate in the discussion until February 6 at 11 pm.*