El nostre pa
“El Nostre Pa” investigates the role of storytelling, manual labor, and memory in shaping rural identity across generations. Rooted in a family tradition of screening a documentary showing my grandfather and his companions harvesting wheat and baking bread, the work examines how narratives from the past construct personal and collective subjectivities today.
Through a focus on agricultural labor—harvesting, bread making, and the repetitive cycles of work—the project reflects on alternative perceptions of time, contrasting the cyclical temporality of rural life with capitalist-linear understandings of productivity. It explores repetition both as a bodily practice and as a narrative form, highlighting how acts of telling and retelling stories become modes of transmitting knowledge, experience, and emotional connection to the land.
The project pays particular attention to the organic, mutable nature of oral knowledge production, considering how stories are not fixed records but living forms of sharing and belonging.
Situated in the material landscape of the wheat fields, it interrogates how site-specific practices and embodied gestures narrate, inhabit, and re-enact a relationship with place.
Through a focus on agricultural labor—harvesting, bread making, and the repetitive cycles of work—the project reflects on alternative perceptions of time, contrasting the cyclical temporality of rural life with capitalist-linear understandings of productivity. It explores repetition both as a bodily practice and as a narrative form, highlighting how acts of telling and retelling stories become modes of transmitting knowledge, experience, and emotional connection to the land.
The project pays particular attention to the organic, mutable nature of oral knowledge production, considering how stories are not fixed records but living forms of sharing and belonging.
Situated in the material landscape of the wheat fields, it interrogates how site-specific practices and embodied gestures narrate, inhabit, and re-enact a relationship with place.
Memory bread
A "bread of memory" was given to bereaved relatives in order to remember the dead. In my breads are inscribed the words that would succeed the instructions for planting wheat. Due to the fermentation process and collective ingestion, these words disappear, thus residing only in memory.
Removing the restriction of the method that goes through the transmission of written information (recipes, user manuals). Returning to the mutant orality. Returning to the momentary transfer, to singing, to talking to oneself, and to all those other forms of conversation. And to the experience: "in the agrarian culture only what is repeated is preserved, there is no other support for him (the farmer) than the living transmission."
A "bread of memory" was given to bereaved relatives in order to remember the dead. In my breads are inscribed the words that would succeed the instructions for planting wheat. Due to the fermentation process and collective ingestion, these words disappear, thus residing only in memory.
Removing the restriction of the method that goes through the transmission of written information (recipes, user manuals). Returning to the mutant orality. Returning to the momentary transfer, to singing, to talking to oneself, and to all those other forms of conversation. And to the experience: "in the agrarian culture only what is repeated is preserved, there is no other support for him (the farmer) than the living transmission."
Wheat fields visit. Locations from the film, 2018