Boja Fauss
by Alessandro Truffa
portfolio shortlisted call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023', 2023
Category: Memories and Traditions
In Turin in the mid-nineteenth century a legend tells that a form of rudeness reserved by the people to the executioner was that the bakers handed him over the bread turned upside down to exercise contempt and evil eye. Prompted by the executioner’s repeated warnings and complaints, local officials issued a city ordinance formal prohibition of the discriminatory practice.To circumvent the law with a creative choice, bakers invented a new solution with magical and symbolic power, a type of brick-shaped bread: the pancarré. Same both below and above, pancarré bread concealed its message. In the impossibility of recognizing the right side, it could continue to be served upside down, thus exerting its silent power. The pancarré was used as an instrument of political dissent against a figure perceived as the embodiment of a system in which justice was publicly ritualized and manifested itself as an instrument of control. A heterogeneous mixture of elements is amalgamated in its dough: judicial news and popular history, literary writings and archival documents; echoes of a trauma settled in the collective memory, but hidden under a soft and reassuring surface.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023