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" Weeds "

The starting point was a discussion with my neighbor.

I live in Normandy most of the year, near (not to say surrounded by) a farm.

One day I was picking flowers in a nearby field, flowers that I had never seen before and which seemed incredibly beautiful to me. The farmer saw me and laughed at me friendly: “What are you doing Adriana?! These are “weeds”! Usually, we don't make a bouquet of of those! »x

Through this series, I explore the meaning of the definition of “bad”, of what we consider to be surplus, useless, or to be removed from our eyes.

Thanks to a telephone application and the advice of the farmer, I decided to take an interest in this plant world. I was able to discover the scientific names as well as the common and informal names of weeds, which often evoke animal body parts, given in the past by rural populations.

I also discovered that sometimes what is not listed as "Weed" is considered and called that by the rural world, such as "field chamomile" which grows naturally in the fields.

I was able to see that scientifically weeds obviously have a function (linked to biodiversity) but that culturally, since they do not meet an immediate need or can potentially be dangerous in a specific context (in a cultivated field, weeds are potential crop destroyers), so they shouldn't be there, we shouldn't look at them or even like them….

“Useless”, “Nasty” or “Harmful” is a non-existent concept in Nature, it is an adjective that can only be conceived by criteria given by human laws and design.

Today more than ever, consumerist criteria categorize, classify, frame the world, to the point that we kill and destroy unreasonably, losing our connection with our ecosystem.

While many global and ecological tragedies have revealed and shown our disconnection, this series attempts to recreate one.

What should usually remain out of sight (weeds) becomes a supporting element of the image and the imagination.

The superposition of images (timeless black and white images and scanned grasses) in a play of density can also evoke a cinematic dissolve, where one meaning gradually gives way to another meaning. This moment of transition then becomes an image in itself, a present time between a before and a possible future or a different reality.

The final image fulfills its role: to drag the eye in many different directions and layers in order to take the time to see, feel, think, imagine.

Sometimes the usual perspectives and formats are not respected, the scanned images of weeds can come out of the frame with a three-dimensional effect in order to cause a change in our perception. The eye is somehow destabilized. Weeds merge with the presence of man or other elements of nature and in particular cows, which represent for me the culmination, but invisible (as if forgotten) of the aggressiveness of consumerist exploitation.For example, a cow can live up to 20 years but nowadays males are killed before their 3rd year of life (for meat consumption) and females (used for milk) are killed around their 8th year of life because, after a certain age, they can no longer meet the cruel criteria of “better productivity”. Not to mention their daily water consumption (around 100 liters per cow) which is totally unsustainable in the context of mass farming.

They are basically treated like “weeds”, on the scale of our society which values ​​“the useless” and devalues ​​“the useful”.

What is even more dramatic is that the farmer himself (and his rural community) is treated with more or less the same lack of respect by the system, making his profession, although undoubtedly necessary, totally devalued. Culturally and economically.

Transition and Change:

The project evolved and it was filled with other attractions.

I thought about these weeds in color, about their real and simple beauty, I felt the need to sublimate them following the example of Monet with his noble water lilies or by representing them in a classic still life composition. .

Then finally I gradually detached myself from the literal definition of weeds, only to be overtaken by the idea that it is nature as a whole that we do not want to see, that it is as if swallowed up in darkness and I I wanted to represent it like this, at night, as if a secret had to be revealed, revealed in the darkness.