Exhibition catalog of Paysans designers, l'agriculture en mouvement [Farmer designers, Agriculture on the move], at musée des Arts décoratifs et du Design Bordeaux, from July 14th 2021 to January 17th 2022.
Curating: Constance Rubini assisted by Étienne Tornier
“Are we witnessing the emergence of a Farming Design? The exhibition Paysans designers presented at the madd-bordeaux looks at a set of practices intended to resolve the problems that arise in our everyday lives, to facilitate our activities and routines: feeding while regenerating soils and ecosystems rather than exploiting them, redefining food production methods, responding to the upheavals in biodiversity and the climate… It shows the reinvention of agriculture, with a commitment to addressing the disruption of biodiversity and the climate, agriculture that repudiates the principle of one-model-fits-all, that creates combinations of unique contextual practices united under the concept of agroecology.”
For this book, I wanted the fore edge of the book evokes strata and highlights the different layers of the soil and the earth, which are at the heart of the concerns raised by the exhibition. In this way, the catalog is divided into three main parts, each printed on a different paper. The first part, mainly visual, shows the images of the exhibition as well as an interview with the agricultural scientist Marc Dufumier; the second is more text-based and focuses on essays and interviews with designers, botanists and viticulturists; finally, the third part gives a voice to the peasants whose work is presented in the exhibition, and contains the appendices of the book (inspiring figures, lexicon, bibliography, etc.).
Following the idea, the layout is also divided in three horizontal areas from top to bottom, for french texts, running titles and page number then english texts.