During the witch hunts, a simple skin flaw—like a scar or birthmark—could be called a “witch’s mark” or “Devil’s mark,” often with deadly consequences for the women who bore them.

This obsession with perfect, flawless female bodies persists today in magazines and advertising, where we see the same smooth, white, youthful faces repeated endlessly. These images shape our collective imagination, erasing diversity, age, and unpredictability.

A similar logic governs modern agriculture. To serve capitalist interests, a few corporations patent seeds, making farmers dependent and banning the sale of countless traditional and vulnerable plant varieties. By monopolizing seeds and criminalizing the sharing of “free” seeds, they endanger biodiversity. As ecofeminist Vandana Shiva calls it: this is the colonization of life.

Les Marques (meaning both marks and brands in French) was created in response. By letting farmers’ seeds grow through images of idealized female bodies from glossy pages, I aim to return to both seeds and bodies their marks, wrinkles, and unpredictability. It is a gesture of resistance—an invitation to reclaim the beauty of imperfection, and the freedom of the living to remain diverse and unpredictable.