Liberté Egalité Moutardé 0

Semestral project on ISBA France, in winter semester 2022/2023
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Coming to a completely different environment, where there were no tasks in school and we ware completely free of choice of what we gonna work on... was the main inspiration for me.

I arrived to France, and one of the first things I realized just after the arrival was, that there is actually no mustard on the shelfs of the shops... no french mustard in France... really... but why?

Well, I starded a small research and the things started to be actually pretty obvious. There were three main reasons for it.
1, French farmers did not want to grow mustard seeds because it was not economical for them, so the mustard producers had to buy it from different countries.
2, The main producer of mustard seeds, Canada, was right after massive heatwave, and most of the crops were destroyed. Heatwaves were of course caused by the global warming.
3, Second biggest producer was Ukraine...

So now we have such a basic symbol as a mustard and such a huge symbolism behind... and then you are talking with French people, listening to them on the streets and in the shops... and they are generally speaking in a way: "I dont care, I just want my mustard back on my plate"

I decided, well, we were in a human epoch of hoaxes, so why not create hoaxes. First of all, somehow I found a small 4g packages of mustards in school canteen so I decided to start stealing them very obviously. Then, some mustards apeared again on the shelves so I started to make it bigger.. I went to the supermarket, loaded my trolley full with mustard jars, walk around te store for half hour and then take them back to the shelf.

As a last performance, I decided to go to the source, directly to the Dijon in front of Maille store, probably the most known mustard store in the world, with a protest sign "Liberez La Moutarde" ("Make mustard free! ")... and give all the mustard I stole, to the people for free.

VIDEO:
https://youtu.be/vekI2PW8Af0?si=dpFqVuee3JWGc36S