Antoine Neufmars (Belgium)
FLORAL PERSPECTIVES
FLORAL PERSPECTIVES is the first chapter of an ongoing photographic project documenting the quiet strength of flora growing in marginal environments. Developed during a residency at Villa Empain in Brussels, this body of work investigates how plants reclaim and survive in urban and post-industrial areas.
The project explores diverse “third landscapes” – a term coined by Gilles Clément – such as railway edges, fugitive gardens, water treatment zones, abandoned industrial spaces, and even landfills. It extends into Wallonia’s former mining regions, particularly Charleroi, where I'll collaborate with the Musée de la Photographie to access historical and ecological insight around the Terrils (slag heaps). These spaces, often dismissed as ruins, become sites of unexpected regeneration.
Using macro photography, soft focus, and natural light manipulation, I isolate fragments of resilience and transform overlooked plants into aesthetical subjects. They are neither weeds nor symbols – they are protagonists of adaptation, growing where human structures fail or decay.
This chapter lays the foundation for a larger European archive of “silent flora”: non-heroic, persistent life forms that resist invisibly across geographies. In the Belgian context, the project reflects on the legacy of industrialization, the ecological afterlife of modernity, and the fragile strength of life in overlooked spaces.
Antoine Neufmars lives and works in Brussels (BE).
He is currently an artist-in-residence at the Villa Empain – Boghossian Foundation. His multidisciplinary practice blends photography, writing, and performance, forming a sensitive investigation of the archive – whether intimate or collective. His work engages with introspection, spoken memory, and everyday gestures, drawing attention to what Georges Perec called the infra-ordinary: the fragments of life we overlook but which shape our shared human experience.
From these subtle traces – a scent, a passing word, a face, a handwritten note – Neufmars constructs portraits that unfold as installations, exhibitions, in situ works, or performances. These “close-up” forms of storytelling explore the fragile threshold between the personal and the public, image and memory, presence and disappearance.
His latest series, FLORAL PERSPECTIVES, focuses on the silent resilience of flora in "third landscapes", capturing the delicate and often overlooked beauty of plants growing in neglected, abandoned spaces. The series archives and highlights the powerful potential of these "invasive" species, turning them into symbols of hope, resistance and beauty.
His work has been presented in major cultural institutions and international events, including the Venice Biennale, BOZAR – Centre for Fine Arts (Brussels), La Casa Encendida (Madrid) and Magacin (Belgrade).
