Gomma Photography Grant 2025
Unfolding Shadows
Photographer
Francesca Comune
Unfolding Shadows
14 Feb, 2026
Unfolding Shadows documents the ongoing renovation of architect Victor Horta’s theatre at the Bozar Museum in Brussels, commissioned by architect Pierre Hebbelinck and initiated in September 2024. Positioned at the intersection of documentary photography and spatial research, the project examines processes of projection—both physical and metaphorical—through the theatre’s gradual transformation.Horta’s architectural vision for the Palais des Beaux-Arts established symbolic and visual correspondences between different levels of the building, particularly between the ground-floor Hall and the underground Salle M, where forms echo and mirror one another. The renovation uncovers and reactivates these latent relationships, reopening the space to renewed interpretation.Drawing on the writings of Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault, and Henri Lefebvre, Unfolding Shadows approaches the theatre as a liminal zone—a palimpsest where temporal strata and spatial narratives converge. Construction sites are framed not as ruptures, but as dynamic terrains of memory and imagination, where material structure and symbolic meaning remain in constant negotiation.Through photography, the project dissects architectural layers to reveal the tension between permanence and transformation, fiction and function, dream and reality. Rather than merely documenting renovation, it interrogates how space is continuously re-authored—through construction, recollection, and the act of looking.
About the photographer
Francesca Comune
Francesca Comune, an Italian artist born in Naples in 1997 and based in Brussels, began her career in fashion in Milan before turning to photography upon entering the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels (ARBA-ESA) in 2018. She obtained a Master’s degree in Visual Arts with highest distinction. She is the laureate of the Roger de Conynck Prize (2021), the Tour à Plomb Prize (2023), and the Roger de Conynck Fund Creation Grant (2024), and currently teaches in the Photography Department at ARBA-ESA.Her artistic practice encompasses photography, installation, sculpture, writing, and publishing, grounded in in situ research on transforming spaces. Her work interrogates the social, ideological, and material mechanisms that shape places, approaching the city as a stratified document in which historical traces, narratives, and physical interventions intertwine. Each project unfolds as a site-specific investigation, revealing the tensions and ongoing transformations embedded within environments.Her installations—open and evolving—operate as temporal constructions that challenge dominant spatial logics and propose alternative readings of territory. Balancing documentation, conceptual inquiry, and material experimentation, Francesca Comune’s work invites critical reflection and active engagement with the structures that govern our lived spaces.Recent and upcoming exhibitions include BIP – Biennale de l’Image Possible, Contretype, Espace Vanderborght, and Centre Tour à Plomb in Brussels; Art au Centre in Liège (June 2025); Loopraum Gallery in Berlin (August 2025); and L’Image Satellite in Nice (September 2025).
