11.12.25 – 21.12.25, #185 Clair Bravo & Noé Znidarsic, From where we grow

The exhibition FROM WHERE WE GROW by Clair Bravo & Noé Znidarsic brings together two photographic approaches that explore the construction of identity in their practice through their respective experiences.

In their ongoing work Where We Bloom, Clair Bravo explores queer rural communities and the ways queer people inhabit, navigate, and transform rural spaces in France. Through portraits, landscapes, and documentary fragments, the project reflects on belonging, visibility, and how queer presence reshapes environments so often imagined as conservative or heteronormative. Rooted in a rural perspective shaped by their own upbringing, the work questions what it means to be queer beyond the city’s walls, how queer lives take root, unfold, and endure in places where they are frequently overlooked. The series of analog images offers a soft cartography of queer presence across the countryside. During three months of travel, they grew close to people they met, encountered a wide range of kinship practices, laughed deeply and often, allowed time to slow, and confided doubts, worries, and care.

In MODEL CARD, Noé Znidarsic explores the temporality of the fashion world, focusing on suspended moments that often escape the collective imagination: the pauses backstage between fittings, the silence of casting rooms, the seemingly endless waiting. These intervals reveal another facet of modeling, one that resists spectacle and glamour. The project appropriates and subverts the ambiguous form of the model card, also called a “composite” in French. Traditionally, this object serves both as a professional identity card and as a promotional tool, designed to attract clients through standardized information: height, measurements, hair color, and so on. Reduced to a formula, the body becomes data — a surface to be consumed. By reworking this format, MODEL CARD shifts its original utilitarian function and questions the very structures that frame the lives of young models. “In this continuity, the project establishes a link with the portraits and images I have produced over the past years, deliberately replaying the same visual schemes as those of traditional model cards.” Being a “model” — a term derived from the Latin modulus, diminutive of modus (measure, standard) — thus becomes a field of reversal. By subsequently reintroducing people who are no longer part of the industry, the project proposes an alternative reading of the body represented: a body that is no longer merely a surface for standardized projection, but one that exposes and reveals the mechanisms of representation and the standardization of beauty.

Together, these two bodies of work invite viewers to reflect on how identity, community, and self- expression are both constructed and performed, and how spaces—whether rural landscapes or fashion worlds—are reshaped by those who inhabit them.