Federica Landi, The Ballad of Silent Seeds, 2024

The Ballad of Silent Seeds is a story about the lives and community of Burkinabe women from the village of Pargou, a farming community living and working in rural southeastern Burkina Faso.

“I have always been convinced that the way we get in touch with matter is through filters. I have rarely created what I needed and most of the time I am not aware of where the things I consume and own come from or what they are made of. The truth is that I have always been provided with the finished product, and this is what I know. Daily life in some countries is well organized in a chain of neat filters and mediations, and people have learned to work through them. Sometimes I wonder how the world around me would change if we were all left alone to handle only the raw material. What if the only filter between us and physical reality were our bodies and the ability to directly manipulate things?”

In Burkina Faso, women play a key role in society, and their constant activity of recombining raw materials subverts consumerist logic and creates a kind of energy that impacts objects, spaces, and bodies. Everything seems to possess a certain anarchic vibration and autonomy to move freely and position itself in any place.