BLURRING THE LINES
BLURRING THE LINES

Benedetta Stefani

Chi mangia le briciole va in paradiso

EDITION

2022, Shortlisted

school

Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche,
Urbino, Italy

This study on bread stems from a visceral attraction to this food, which, in its simplicity, is essential. With the discovery of leavened bread, we can identify a first complex object in the history of human civilization: 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 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 changed its form and status, becoming a soft ghost. It arrives in our homes already cut, and we no longer see the crumbs. Thus, emptying itself of its nutritional value, it has acquired a negative meaning to spare that dimension so feared nowadays: time.

By rediscovering dignity in bread-making, this project suggests taking time, pausing, and contemplating the present, in an anachronistic gesture that goes against market, performativity and efficiency logic, to regain the perception of a meaningful duration. It wants to suggest an intimate resistance.

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Benedetta Stefani

Chi mangia le briciole va in paradiso

EDITION

2022, Shortlisted

school

Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche,
Urbino, Italy

This study on bread stems from a visceral attraction to this food, which, in its simplicity, is essential. With the discovery of leavened bread, we can identify a first complex object in the history of human civilization: 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 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 changed its form and status, becoming a soft ghost. It arrives in our homes already cut, and we no longer see the crumbs. Thus, emptying itself of its nutritional value, it has acquired a negative meaning to spare that dimension so feared nowadays: time.

By rediscovering dignity in bread-making, this project suggests taking time, pausing, and contemplating the present, in an anachronistic gesture that goes against market, performativity and efficiency logic, to regain the perception of a meaningful duration. It wants to suggest an intimate resistance.

← Previous Talent

Next Talent →