Urbanautica

GEOPHAGIA AND THE PETRIFICATION OF BREAD

by Elisa Dainelli

© Mariano Monea from the series 'Geophagia'

"Geophagia" is your thesis project at ISIA Urbino. The work combines photography, geography, history, and anthropology. Can you explain where interest in the topic comes from and what it is?

Geophagia is research that starts from the interest in the toasting of bread, its "petrification". The metaphorical relationship with geophagia - which literally means eating the earth - is the synthesis between the morphological characteristics of the food and the material intervention that has its roots in the dough. The research starts from the local practice of creating and consuming toast among the peasant populations of Calabria: a method for the lower classes to conserve bread and thus stave off hunger. Bourgeois ferocity cried: "Eat stones!" This bread, considered crude and sour food is more satisfying than the fresh one or the aestheticized host that melts easily in the mouth. The relationship between bread and earth - recurring in the popular imagination - has generated a poetic/political interest in which the nutritional function is mixed with the therapeutic one, the magical-ritual suggestion with the playful-fantastic one.

© Mariano Monea from the series 'Geophagy'

© Mariano Monea from the series 'Geophagy'

What criteria did you adopt in constructing the narrative and putting together materials from different sources?

During the research, I wondered what method I should adopt in the experimentation phase I call "adulterated doughs". Once mixed with other elements (iron, bark, bones, clay, etc.) I cooked the bread and then toasted the loaves obtained. The link between the dough and the different materials appeared when I broke the bread: the opening act of its body revealed the work to me. In the construction of the narrative, as in the first part of the book, the transparent element becomes the reading method, with paper changes capable of generating poetic connections. The superimposition of images, given by the transparency of the paper, led to polysemantic appearances.

© Mariano Monea from the series 'Geophagia'

© Mariano Monea from the series 'Geophagia'

This research connects to your home region, Calabria. Can you tell us about this bond?

A harsh and rough land, Calabria is dry and damp. It is the rain that meets the dry soil that suggests to man how to knead bread. Calabria is mountainous and made up of small, depopulated villages that anticipate both an end and new community perspectives. Here there is only archeology of industry, the skeletons of a process dead at birth. Hence the possibility of binding ourselves to the archaic and the practices of material culture. As a "remnant," I ask myself: in a world where everything runs to be consumed, why not tie yourself to what remains, to what still speaks of human?

How did you edit the rich iconography you collected in this thesis?

The first part of the book is loaded and the photographic material - with material archives, illustrations, and paintings to form a large imaginary around the theme. I searched the archive material through historical and iconographic texts and on the web: I printed and photographed everything as if to take possession of it. The use of different paper form superimpositions and new images: in the book's design, the transparencies were printed separately, on acetate and tissue paper sheets, and inserted inside the book's signatures.

© Mariano Monea from the series 'Geophagia'

"Geophagia" also focuses on Africa and colonialism. Can you briefly explain how the practice of "eating earth" has become an instrument of domination?

One of the most critical reports on geophagia is by the naturalist Von Humbolt during his expedition to Peru: from 1799 to 1804. He writes that the Ottomac tribe ate a type of clay without understanding its ecological implications - aspects that modernity has labeled as archaic and primitive - merely commenting through those stereotypes that were beginning to consolidate in Europe. Africa and the New World offered doctors and naturalists the opportunity to observe the behavior of savages. Aesthetics of the gaze and science begin to walk together, anticipating taxonomy and positivist anthropometry. The moralization of geophagic behavior, defined as a "depraved appetite that strikes the civilian natives of Africa and South America", was building a bestial image to be curbed. In the colonial plantations of South America, Europeans began to apply masks that prevented them from eating the earth, the dirt ("dirty eating"). In the European eyes, the geophagic behavior of slaves is considered vicious, a propensity to consume dirty. Several authors and missionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have left us representations of some anti-geophagy masks present in the first part of my research.

© Mariano Monea from the series 'Geophagia'

What have you learned from this research?

The theme, little known, allowed to generate archetypal connections intertwining poetry, material, and anthropological reflection. These multiple gazes have allowed me to research without specializations. It may happen that pregnant women, especially in the first three months, have cravings that lead them to desire this type of diet. It is an ancestral relationship that binds men to the earth, producing a reference to the womb and ecologies where cultures have established and meant the relationships with the environment in a circular synergy. All of this was interrupted by the medicalization and Western progress that labels these practices as pathological, the result of "a depraved appetite". Psychiatry classified geophagia as "Pica behavior": an eating disorder for the medical gaze, often observable during pregnancy. The Greek word "kissa" indicates both the bird Pica - in popular culture its cackling foreshadows disturbing events - and the food cravings that women have during the first months of pregnancy and which, according to belief, they will leave on the body of the unborn child through a stain, a sign. The medical language uses this bird to stigmatize this behavior that is considered deviant. This research point generated archetypal connections in me: the mother and the earth, the womb, and the swollen bread.

© Mariano Monea from the series 'Geophagia'

© Mariano Monea from the series 'Geophagia'

What were the main difficulties and challenges you encountered?

I encountered various difficulties in managing all the stimuli raised by research and the connections that began to arise: the imagery created in the first part of the book intends to stimulate the reader's imagination by involving more glances. But I encountered several possibilities. The research lasted about a year and a half spent observing, as well as gnawing, this petrified bread. Meanwhile, I tried to experiment with the sculptures - found in the book's final part - obtained from the impure dough. I always thought that the ligament that formed the bread with iron or bones resulted from a mineralogical synthesis, the synthesis of a geological time. These sculptures, born from the accidental and unable to repeat themselves, remind me of fossils: but it is the work's ambiguity that gives me the material imagination that Gaston Bachelard talks about so much.

Your thesis has been selected for the 2020 edition of Ragusa FotoFestival and exhibited at Palazzo La Rocca, in Ragusa, through three sculptures that recall the tradition of drying bread. Can you tell us about these works and the historical-cultural path that precedes them?

The first people to talk about the bread toasting process were the Greeks, who called it "Panis Nauticus", the bread of the great navigators of mythical tales. The drying petrifies it, removes the decomposition process, and allows conservation: toasted after cooking, this bread speaks to us of hunger, earth, and misery. In Calabria, we use the adjective "tostu" (toast, dessicate) to indicate the method and a digestive function: the drier and harder it is to chew, the more satiated. It was also widespread practice - among the lower classes, especially in times of famine - to incorporate in the loaves of bread all those foods that were not digestible and edible but capable of carrying out the pure function of filling. Piero Camporesi talks about it in his book “Il pane selvaggia”.

When we talk about geophagia we talk about ecological, cultural and policies. What is edible, therefore socially shared, is determined by internal values of the reference culture: food, seen as a source of pleasure subjective; it is also a place of objective rules. But if we take hunger as a bestial impulse that the hungry subjectively perceives, we must understand how this need is anti-moral par excellence, and therefore against all rules. Geophagia is interesting precisely because it is considered a deviant practice from the dominant aesthetic, at least dismal, to the Western gaze. This research tends to perturb, decolonize thought. Geophagia, petrified bread, slaves, peasants, the hungry: here is the table ready for the miserable, a hunger banquet, for discomfort, a mirror reflection of reality, this grotesque-allegorical play in a climate of collective drama. Like the dirt disguised by the dye, the bread shows itself in perfect sincerity before revealing itself to be gaunt, cavernous, dark, impure, pathological.

© Mariano Monea from the series 'Geophagia'

What are you working on now? In terms of using photography as a research tool?

I returned to Calabria after years of studies outside the region. Now I am a "remnant", that is, I have decided to stay and become attached to what remains of human. My research begins to mix art with gestures, practices, and the peasant landscape: photography allows me to poetize an experience, even when it seems pure documentation. The research leads me to question the anthropological structures of the imaginary and the poetization of reality; as a possible escape from the rigidity of meaning.

Maybe it's an attempt to show the powers of imagination, but above all, activate it through the ambiguity of what remains. For some time, I have been mixing languages, passing through sculpture, photography, video, editing, and recording to not fall into specific categories.

LINKS
Mariano Monea (instagram)

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