NUA

NUA is a photographic project resulting from a chance and decisive encounter between a movement artist and a photographer, both inspired by the body and nudity in relation to nature.

The authors
Etienne is a photographer and author. He was born in Marseille and lives in the Hautes-Alpes region of France. Photography, which he took up as a teenager, has always been a guiding force in his life, and he has been devoting himself entirely to it for a long time.
Maïra is a multidisciplinary Brazilian artist. She arrived in Europe twelve years ago to study at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts du Cirque (ESAC) in Brussels, where she graduated as a trapeze artist. She now lives in Marseille. She is a mother, yoga teacher and passionate about the performing arts and movement. She is currently writing her first solo show, "Macacada".

The project
Maïra met Etienne Renzo during a photo shoot in May 2022 in the Hautes Alpes. Through her work as a circus artist and professional dancer, she has been exploring the relationship between nudity and wild environments for several years. Etienne has always photographed faces, bodies in nature, the nature of flesh and the taste of skin. Over time, this collected pollen has become the essence of his photographic work.

Maïra:
I feel that it is my quilombola* and indigenous ancestors who have given me the tools to connect with other forms of life in nature. But it is also thanks to my background in the movement arts, through circus, dance, yoga, climbing and capoeira, that I feel myself dancing, massaging, stretching or embracing with my body the body of the tree or the stone.
* Quilombo is a self-sufficient organisation that originated in Brazil during colonisation. Enslaved people who managed to escape their condition found refuge in the deep forest, in a confluence of indigenous and African cosmogonies. An example of resistance that still persists today, not without difficulty.

Etienne:
In my photographs, I seek to rediscover the mythological dimension of the universe, this luxuriant chaos, the mystery of the earth in the silt, of the flesh in the body. I want to rediscover lost innocence, to reinvent it with tenderness and voluptuousness. The insurmountable reconciliation of nature and the natural hominid, that of pre-human times, provokes all the possibilities I want to believe in.

The NUA book with the complete texts and photos is available on the "contact-shop"