This study on bread stems from a visceral attraction to this food, which, in its simplicity, is essential. It is with the discovery of leavened bread that we can identify a first complex object in the history of human civilisation: the result of cooperation between natural processes and human technology. In addition to all its beneficial characteristics from a dietary point of view, bread was immediately charged with multiple symbolic and cultural meanings. Its nutritional value gives life in the most materialistic and biological sense, but it is the symbolic and cultural values are the ones that have shaped men, their beliefs, and their struggles. The culture of bread today points out some of the tensions in our society: on the one hand, the run for acceleration in every technological process, on the other, a force that attempts to counter this trend by readjusting itself to biological and human limits. Even this object has adapted to capitalist society, losing most of its nutritional properties to accommodate the imperatives of industrial systems. In a disposable society, bread has therefore changed its form and status, becoming a soft ghost. It arrives in our homes already cut and we no longer even see the crumbs. Thus, emptying itself of its nutritional value, it has acquired a negative meaning, simply to spare that dimension so feared nowadays: time. We rush, hurrying towards a future that will never arrive, often forgetting that we live in a present. What might our perception of the world be like if we were not so afraid of the duration of things, of processes, of experiences? In developing a discourse around bread, I would like to suggest as food for thought the search for the individual's contact with this complex – historically, culturally, and symbolically stratified – object, but which at the same time is so close to us and accessible to all our senses. Then it becomes essential the touch of the hand with the materials, which they are no longer inert, thus shaped according to the preconceived idea of the creator. The creative process therefore becomes collaboration – or correspondence, to use a term as put by anthropologist Tim Ingold – between the subject and the materials: the final shape depends on the dynamic qualities and relationship of both parties. By rediscovering dignity in the practice of bread-making, this project wants to suggests taking time, pausing and contemplating the present, in an anachronistic gesture that goes against market, performativity and efficiency logic, in order to regain the perception of a meaningful duration. It wants to suggests an intimate resistance. One possibility, perhaps, could be taking care of the gestures by which we interact with and in the world. Starting with a piece of bread.

Video of the graduation's book Chi mangia le briciole va in paradiso