PREGNANT WITH ALL THE SEASONS  (2023-24)

Through the relationship between a female body and the agricultural landscape,

the project tells a story of care and coexistence that is far removed from logics of

domination.

The work unfolds across several dimensions of time.

The cyclical time of agriculture stands in opposition to a linear, extractive view of the world, revealing a form of knowledge transmitted through experience, waiting, and listening. It follows the rhythm of the seasons, of birth and death, of the continuous exchange between living and non-living beings. It changes with the histories of humans, techniques, and ecosystems, and today with climate change. A time that always brings within itself—literally—the fruits of the previous season and the seeds of the next.

It is a time of hard work and fatigue, observation and attentiveness: at least this is how Francesca, my cousin, a forty-year-old farmer for twenty years, experiences it. She cultivates her land in Tuscany alone, attentive to biodiversity and ecological sustainability, seeking balance within productive cycles, with a deep sense of wonder that remains both concrete and poetic.

It is also a time made of repetitive actions, gestures that become a performance of the body in space, a dance among vegetables, earth, water, and sky. The cycles unfolding in the fields meet the presence of a female body that interacts with them, nourishes them and is nourished in turn. The images explore her femininity, which questions expectations and gently unsettles standardized ideas about the female body, its gestures, and its role in the cycles of life and nourishiment. It tries to visualize her stubborn return to the land and to a closeness to plants, animals and elements. The photographs capture moments within the flow of time, but at times something slips—small misalignments that suggest possible short circuits. Nothing in nature, or in our relationship with it, is ever fully determined or predictable.

The structure of the work develops through three visual approaches—observational photography, still life, and serial arrangements—three parallel and intertwined paths, playing with a double register of description and metaphor. I shared this expanded time with Francesca, listening to sounds and silence, looking for signs in the soil, the leaves, the movements of insects, in an attempt to understand something more about time, womanhood, closeness, and nature.

Francesca is a single mother and a writer—another way in which her relationship with the land takes form. Through her blog La Raccontadina and her books, she speaks about ecological awareness and sustainable living, resisting the consumerist and extractive logic of contemporary society.

The title of this project is an excerpt from one of her texts.