THE VALUE OF BREAD








King Ramses Bakery

“Food and land and labour and human dignity are the only real sources of value but we trade those for cash hardly giving a thought for our children, our air, our water. But we can’t eat cash, no matter how much we make! So the value of bread is not in the price, but in the inherent integrity of the cycle, from seed to grain to mill to dough, into my stomach and back out to the soil, via my composting toilet.”
Kiko Denzer

ALCHEMY

I was brought up with bread making being an existential, and therefore integral, part of the weeks work. My grandmother baked, my mother baked and even my father baked bread. Not just one at the time but often in batches of 6, that filled the house with the unmistakable aroma of yeast and freshly made bread.
I once read that the grain looses 40% of its nutritional value, i.e. energy, only a week after the husk of the grain has been broken and milled into flour. A lot of the flour we buy have been milled months ago and stored badly in too warm and light conditions and have consequently lost a lot of its original energy. The only solution is to eat bread made from freshly, ground flour. 10 years ago I was given an electric grain grinder; a beautiful, wooden contraption with a stone mill inside.
This transformed my bread making into an aesthetic experience where every part of the process revealed its own richness of beauty. This is a ritual that I, or my husband, has performed weekly - often aided by our children who have had the important role of stopping the flour overflowing while being milled and then mixing all the dry ingredients together. Whilst doing my MA in Dartington, UK, I didn´t bake, and thinking of the process in perspective compelled me to follow it with a film camera. I did not want to reproduce the process as I remembered it. Neither did I want to create a romantic propaganda film or an information video to teach people how to make bread. I simply wanted to observe my own experience in the process of making bread and to communicate the sensation, the energy and subtle transitions from one matter to another - the chain of physical and interactive events creating a whole coupled with the magic - the alchemy of bread making.

BREAD AS SOCIAL SCULPTURE



















Read more about my breadwork on www.evabakkeslett.com - Work/Projects - The Poetics of Bread

COMPANION


Did you know that the Arabic words for “bread” and “life” is the same – aysh. The Russian word for hospitality – khlyeb-sol – means bread and salt and it is still customary there to greet any visitors with a piece of bread and salt. The Latin roots for companion also leads us to the sharing of bread, com meaning with and pani – bread.

SENSIBLE PERSPECTIVES


Baking bread is a cross-cultural and ancient art that deserves to be celebrated and acknowledged as a universal art form. Good bread provides the needed glue between life and art, it creates social bonds and restores the loss of sensibility and meantime that is lacking in our efficient and homogenized world. By baking our own bread we reconnect with our soil, soul and our senses. I call it "sensible perspectives". I do not mean sensible in the way we have come to understand the word but sensible as in being awake, aware and alert with the capacity to expand our consciousness and perceive through our senses. Baking bread is a wholesome, aesthetic experience. Everyone can be an artist through sculpting, baking and sharing bread.

Bread is the art that goes beyond the walls of the gallery and onto our kitchen table.

ABOUT THE FILM ALCHEMY

Alchemy is a short film celebrating the poetics of bread. The film is a poetic evocation on the alchemy of bread and brings the act of baking the most basic of staples, into a high art form. Here nature and human culture collude. Hands pounding, mixing, kneading and stretching, reveal the choreographed rhythms and movements of bread making. Alchemy is a beautifully executed and lyrical film about an activity once ubiquitous in almost every household.It follows the process of making and baking bread where nature and culture magically unify. The film reveals how baking bread can be poetic, beautiful, foster slowness, empathy, and connection to our environment and ourselves. It gives a timeless account of the lyrical process and the "spaces in between" that makes bread the art that goes beyond the walls of the gallery and onto our kitchen table.

The baker and filmmaker was brought up in Arctic Norway where baking bread used to be and some places still is ubiquitous to every household. Her rhythmical movements and reassured touch gives associations to dance and music and brings baking into the realms of poetry. It reminds us of the connections and traditional knowledge we have left behind, but also gives us the incentive and impetus to rediscover and reconnect to the ancient art of bread-baking.