Seeds and Tales

Seeds and Tales is a fine-art print photography initiative by Riccardo Riccio in collaboration with the Brazilian agro-ecological company Trovão Tropical and the multilingual press Plataforma9. Over two years of expeditions throughout Brazil, the Seeds project collected over 300 species of unique seeds. Alongside seed guardians, it documented oral traditions regarding cultivation and management, spiritual and medicinal properties, and incredible stories associated with each seed. This research is compiled in the Seeds and Tales book-catalog, published by Plataforma9 in 2024.As opposed to translated, the Seeds and Tales book was written bilingually. The content was crafted with both English and Brazilian Portuguese in mind, not only to communicate to both audiences, but to bridge these two distinct literary cultures. On the one hand, we have the stylistic legacy of western biology texts; concise, observationally apt, and rigidly structured. On the other, we have the stylistic legacy of pre-colonial oral lore; ancestral tales, wisdom, and poetic symbolism.