Sylvie Fleury was born on June 24, 1961, in
Geneva, Switzerland. After her initial schooling, her parents sent her to
New York City to work as an
au pair. She ended up falling in with a group of NYU students working on short art films. She then went on to study photography at the Germain School of Photography in 1981. While living in New York she worked as an assistant for fashion photographer
Richard Avedon for one day. Fleury then travelled onto India where she encountered learned Bharatanatyam dance, she returned to Geneva and worked for the
Red Cross. Under the pseudonym of Silda Brown, she began to collect items marked with a red cross. She converted her apartment into a dentist's cabinet because she was able to acquire a practice facility at a reasonable price. In 1990 she met the Swiss performance artist John Armleder from Geneva and became his assistant. In the same year she and Armleder moved to Villa Magica, a large old town house on the outskirts of Geneva. In 2004 Fleury and Armleder and his son Stéphane Armleder (1977), founded the Geneva Record Label Villa Magica Records. The label also published CDs and LPs from John Armleder and Sylvie Fleury, from Rockenschaub and John B. Rambo (aka Stéphane Armleder). == Career ==