Christelle Yambayisa

Born in Rwanda on 12 January 1988, Christelle Yambayisa arrived in France in 1996 after fleeing the genocide. It was in 2015, while preparing a thesis in strategy and governance, that she was offered the chance to become a model.
Her passion for photography began at a very early age, and in a way enabled her to put words and feelings to her difficult past. Over the years, she has used photography as a means of expressing her traumas.
Her story and certain experiences have led her to speak out publicly on a number of social and political issues, including the cult of age in modelling, the legal status of models and online hate and racism. These events have also led her to come face to face with genocide.
Ever since she was very young, she has been documenting her life, as a way of creating her own memories. All her early childhood photos were destroyed during the war. Her exhibition La Mode, Les Mondes is the first step the artist has taken towards a personal remembrance of the Rwandan genocide. She wants to encourage people who have lived through the same thing as her to express themselves on the subject in a non-political and non-partisan way.
Her photographs are composed of landscapes, portraits, moments of work and life captured with SLRs and hybrids between 2013 and 2020, and in equal measure with film and hybrid photography up to the present day.