The good seed
Thierry Ardouin / Tendance Floue
To be commercialised in France, a seed must be registered in the official catalogue of species and varieties. This catalogue guarantees a standardisation for farmers who buy these seeds each year, since most of the seeds are hybrid, therefore non reproducible. The Kokopelli organisation, specialising in the commercialisation of old seeds, refuses to register them, in this way aiming their free circulation and reproduction. Kokopelli has been subjected to judicial proceedings and condemned for selling non authorised seeds.
We are thus confronted with a fundamental opposition: on the one hand, certified seeds, sometimes coated with phyto-sanitary products, which produce vegetables of the same calibre and aspect. On the other, seeds of the rustic variety, that are natural and adapted to their local environment. They are freely exchanged, and produce vegetables of an incomparable taste.
These portraits of legal and illegal seeds reveal the diversity of textures and colours, the variety of forms and contours. Carefully chosen, lightened and framed, they become symbols that question our relation to origins and examine the confiscation of living things by the seed multinationals.
