The series Rhizom
brings together portraits of young men who meet at a youth club in Cottbus, photographed over several months of regular visits. The result is a documentary work that centers on pose, gesture, and gaze rather than a narrative sequence of events. The images follow no script. They arise in direct contact on site, often in the moment the camera is noticed and the subjects react: through eye contact, through gestures, through familiar hand signs.
Formally, the work moves between classical portraiture and incidental observation. Recurring compositions and poses from different encounters are placed side by side, so that a pattern emerges across the individual images.
The title refers to the concept of the Rhizom by Deleuze and Guattari. Applied to the series, the term describes how gestures and poses spread among the subjects, not along clear role models or lines of transmission, but more like a network in which every connection counts as much as any other. Masculinity appears here not as something firmly rooted, but as something that continually branches anew.