Within the spaces of the Project Room and Mezzanine, dedicated to dialogue around contemporary issues and to explorations of multiple identities, and of the relationship between body, identity and representation within creative communities, 10 Corso Como presents YOUTH The Naked Truth, a new project by Christian Boaro.

An independent fashion designer, Christian Boaro has, for more than ten years, developed a photographic practice alongside his work in fashion design, focusing on the body and the identities that inhabit and traverse it. The project has grown out of an uninterrupted succession of encounters: friends, creatives, people he has known or met by chance, individuals discovered in the street, in clubs, through social media or during his travels. Over time, these encounters have formed a constantly evolving human archive, an informal mapping of a contemporary creative community  and its multiple forms of existence. The skin becomes a geography, and the body a territory in which identity manifests itself, transforms and resists any single definition. Chosen by Boaro as his privileged medium, the Polaroid records these encounters through unique and unrepeatable images, capturing a moment suspended between the presence of the subject and the gaze of the photographer. Photography thus becomes a space of encounter, in which identity is neither constructed nor imposed, but simply observed in all its complexity.

YOUTH The Naked Truth does not propose an ideal of beauty, but questions the very need for a model. The bodies photographed are multiple and diverse: young, tattooed and untattooed, marked by scars, transformations and asymmetries, conforming and non-conforming bodies. Boaro does not seek perfection, but a form of beauty capable of embracing difference. Imperfection thus becomes a form of uniqueness, and the body a means through which identity can assert itself without having to conform to a standard. Above all, the project is an exploration of the gaze and of the possibility of representing others outside the codes of polished, glossy photography. The subjects look directly into the camera without ostentation, free from the encumbrance of clothing and make-up, revealing themselves through minimal gestures, postures, details and presences. Women and men, cisgender and transgender, appear one after another without aesthetic hierarchy and without the need to identify a single form of belonging.

It is precisely this multiplicity that defines the project’s sense of identity. The images do not seek to classify a community through shared characteristics, but to construct it through difference. Identity emerges as something plural, fluid and constantly evolving. The immediacy of the encounter meets the slow and irreversible nature of the Polaroid: each photograph is unique, unreproducible and untouched by post-production. Light, distance, framing, pose and chance all become part of the 
process through which Boaro constructs his own idea of reality. Even the blurs, burns and imperfections that emerge on the surface of the Polaroid become an integral part of the image: not errors to be corrected, but traces of the process and its unpredictability, capable of restoring a more physical, fragile and authentic dimension to representation.

At 10 Corso Como, the project presents a selection of Polaroids distributed between the Project Room and the Mezzanine. On the upper floor, the sequence of portraits creates an environment in which individual identities enter into dialogue with one another; in the Mezzanine, a slideshow further expands the archive, transforming it into a continuous flow of presences. YOUTH The Naked Truth is therefore an open archive, without hierarchies and without conclusion.