PREGNANT WITH ALL THE SEASONS [Gravida di tutte le stagioni]

Over the seasons, I photographed my cousin, a farmer. Through the relationship between her body and the land, through times and cycles of agriculture, body and nourishment, the project tells of care and coexistence, far from logics of domination.

I have a cousin, Francesca, who shares my name and is the same age as me. A woman in her forties who has made a living as a farmer for over twenty years, working her own land in Tuscany, not far from crowded tourist routes. I live far away and rarely see her. Her daily life, in direct, concrete and at the same time poetic contact with the elements of nature, fascinates me deeply. I admire her knowledge and, in some way, a life so different from my own as a photographer living in a big city.
I began visiting her on my trips back to Tuscany, with photography as a pretext. I kept returning in every season, year after year. A photographic series grew out of this, one that draws close to her and her world.

The images explore a femininity that resists standardized ideas about the female body: a body that works, sweats and gets dirty, neither idealized nor decorative, yet fully part of the cycles of life and nourishment. At the same time, they stage an imagery of food far from the polished, styled one we are used to: food that grows, is pulled from the soil, and remains tied to the earth it comes from.
The work unfolds through different dimensions of time.
The time of agriculture, which follows the rhythm of the seasons, of birth and death, of the continuous exchange between living and non-living things. It returns, cyclical, yet it changes with the stories of human beings, techniques and ecosystems, and today with climate crisis. A time that always carries within it, literally, the fruits of the previous season and the seeds of the next.
It is a time of hard work and effort, waiting and observation; at least this is how Francesca experiences it. She farms her land alone, with no chemicals and no machinery, relying on biodiversity and ecologically sustainable production. She seeks balance within the productive cycles, relating to the land and to other beings with a deep sense of wonder.
It is also a time made of repetitions, of gestures that become a performance of the body in space, a silent dance between vegetables, earth, water and sky. The cycles unfolding in the field meet the presence of a female body that interacts with them, nourishes them and is nourished by them.
The photographs capture moments in the flow of time, but in some cases the sequences do not align perfectly, suggesting possible short circuits: nothing in nature, or in our relationship with it, is completely determined or predictable.
Three visual approaches – observational photography, still life and serial arrangements of gestures – develop as parallel, interconnected paths. Within them, I tried to interpret reality through a lens of my own, absorbing her way of seeing, poetic and concrete at the same time: between documentation, symbolism and allusion.

I spent time in the field with Francesca: following her, observing, listening with her to sounds and silences, looking for signs in the soil, in the sky, in the leaves, in the movements of insects. In that shared time I learned to wait, and to accept that things move and grow at their own pace.

Francesca Pachetti is also a mother (she raised her son on her own after her husband’s death) and a writer, another way in which her relationship with the land takes shape. Through her blog “La Raccontadina” and her books, she speaks about ecological awareness and sustainable lifestyles, opposing the consumerist and extractive logic of contemporary society. The title of this project is taken from one of her texts.