“As a gardener, I was already attached to forms, to aesthetics”

I come from the rural world. My grandfather was a farmer, I spent my childhood in fields with cows. I went to a landscape school, but I was out of school, I left without having the baccalaureate. Then I was lucky enough to come across a boss who made me work in gardens in Lausanne. But, over there, people especially want swimming pools and hedges to protect themselves from neighbors, it was not very interesting! I quickly understood that the garden would not be my final path, already, I was attached to forms, to aesthetics.

In 1992, at 18, I left for Nicaragua. I became an educator in a house with a garden to welcome drug-addicted teenagers, who had lived in the violence of the slums. This is the first food garden that I started with food autonomy.

I knew nothing about photography, there was no artist in the family. But I met a Swiss photographer in Nicaragua, Alban Kakulya, we worked together at the Maison des femmes, we scanned the negatives brought by the mothers of the disappeared, who used the prints to demand justice. Then one day, in a student protest, I took photos of the police killing a protester in front of me. I had to flee the country overnight.

A flavor enhancer

In Switzerland, I enrolled in the Beaux-Arts, but I was too out of step. With Alban Kakulya, we worked on the borders of Europe. We won the Fnac prize: I was able to exhibit, and above all produce a book, in which I brought in anthropologists, historians… In fact, photography does not interest me as such, it is rather a flavor enhancer, a way to express all my questions and doubts. I started a project on the Anthropocene, which became a trilogy. For the first chapter, Deposit, which is interested in the storage of living things, in seed or sperm banks, I organized conferences, invited specialists, writers like Antoine Volodine. I like to titillate, to confront people.

The third chapter of the project looks at botany and soils, and looks at what humans have done with the thin layer of topsoil that covers the planet. I wanted to go around that a bit subjectively. Just before Covid-19, I bought a farm where I live with my family, with half a hectare of land, and started a vegetable garden. I noticed plants that I didn’t know and I became interested in bio-indicator species, which bear witness to the quality of the soil. They are considered invasive, although they are sometimes able to grow on land polluted with heavy metals, or to resist climate change. I started taking photos: a third of my book was made in my garden! Then I went to sites polluted by the watch and pharmaceutical industries… I found these plants there, some of which fix nitrogen.

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