Ariadna Guiteras

Gentle Bread, 2016

Installation and Performance (33 minutes)

Gentle Bread, 2016 / Performance audio documentation (33 minutes)

Gentle Bread, 2016 / ceramic, plastic / installation views at Chalton Gallery, London / variable dimensions / photo: Rosario Ateaga

Can you fly with this?, 2016 / ceramic, plastic / variable dimensions

“Gentle Bread” is the result of research into bread and clay supported by Homesession through their Residency at THIS London. Starting from the overlapping nature of two processes: bread making and clay sculpting, “Gentle Bread” delves into the political and performative aspects -such as oral history, affective communities, production, distribution and gender construction- that come along with its bodily practice.

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Gentle Bread, 2016 / ceramic, plastic / installation views at Chalton Gallery, London / variable dimensions / photo: Rosario Ateaga

Presented as an installation and a performance at Chalton Gallery (London, 2016), ten clay sculptures were positioned on the floor of the space. During the two months of my stay I learnt from different people (amateurs and professionals) how to make bread and ceramics. Given the coincidence that both share very similar gestural process and taking advantage of the poetic potentiality of weaving them together, I focused on non-hegemonic distributions of knowledge such as orality and muscle memory. The sculptures materialize the movements learnt during the process. Simple gestures as bending, pushing, cutting, pinching or kneading were applied to a mass –clay– that was sculptural itself, allowing to tangibly materialize an immaterial knowledge.

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Matriarcado, 2016 / ceramic, plastic bag / 39 x 16 x 9.5 cm

Hidden behind one of the walls of the exhibition space I sang for 33 minutes. I sang about expectations, conversations I had had, deceptions, affects and tactility. Secrets were confessed in a whisper. Expectations, judgment, disappointment, surprise and satisfaction came together in a sort of musicality, rhythm and trance. “Gentle Bread” was composed of the immaterial knowledge I accumulated during the two months. A song became the support to voice the knowledge I received, while letting emotion slip through it. Orality and muscle memory -in the form of the sculptures- coexisted in the same time-space. The gesture of hiding became the link between the two, neglecting my own corporeality to allow a wider path of the gaze of the audience; to lay on the others, along with the space, into the clefts of the matter.

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