Your name
Daria Nazarova
Place of birth
Vologda, Russia
Place where you live now
Paris, France
3 words to describe you
balance, displacement, release
Why do you take pictures?
I take pictures because I have something to say
Where do you get your inspiration?
life, music, art, films, dancing, books
Who are your influences?
I have a lot of them, lately it's mostly music, I love Vangelis, Pink Floyd, Susumu Yokota, I really like the films of Claire Denis, the photographs of Nan Goldin and Claudine Dourey, the paintings of Hilma af Klint.
What determines the subject matter you choose?
I take a pictures about my life, my roots, the place I live, people around me
What impact would you like your art to have?
I just want it to be seen and felt.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
I love art that looks towards the eternal, in which there is depth and there is a story beyond it that I can possibly feel.
Is there anything you want to add?
The ones that have depth, the ones that look towards eternity, the ones that resonate with me

Natura
Project statement

" I could still feel that optimism vibrating through the decades: that our bodies are full of
power, and furthermore that their power is not despite but because of their manifest
vulnerabilities."

Olivia Laing. «Everybody».

For a year and a half, I worked as a model in the sculpture workshop at the Tbilisi State
Academy of Arts, alongside other women from Russia and Belarus. We were observed, measured, sculpted - transformed into objects for study. The stillness of our bodies became a metaphor for our lives, suspended at the moment Russia invaded Ukraine, when we were forced to leave everything behind.

In Georgian, Russian, Belarusian, and several other languages, the word natura refers to a model posing for painters and sculptors. In Latin, it means nature. My body is my only home, my only natural habitat. Nature lives within me, and it surrounds me - in the trees, the mountains, the caves, in the ancient landscapes of a foreign country. I can hide my body among them, or I can reveal it. By being fully naked, I revealed my openness - a vulnerable, almost desperate attempt to overcome the alienation of exile and reach for connection.

Recently, I stopped working as a model, just like the other women. None of us pose anymore. That chapter is over. Yet we carry it with us - a shared memory of being still and silent, exposed and hidden, public and alone, familiar and alien. We are learning to process this strange, intimate experience, and from the quiet, we begin to move again - slowly, uncertainly, but forward.

daria nazarova
@nazarovadar