Bread on earth is an archive and research project founded by the artist Lexie Smith. It explores the potential of bread - the ultimate food, synonymous with wealth, poverty, the divine and the banal - as a social, political, economic and ecological barometer.

Artist Lexie Smith is calling for contributions to a collaborative database of different types of bread, which will then be accessible to all: researchers, bakers and anyone interested in exploring and preserving global foodways. To add breads to this database, go to the project website: “Bread web”.

Lexie Smith’s installation Making you into what you’re made of was featured in the group exhibition Cum panis : le pain et ses écologies at 19, Crac in Montbéliard from 10th February to 5th May 2024.

Photo : Bread on earth, Lexie Smith.

An exchange between Arnaud Rognon, Pascal Laprée (farmers) and Julia Morlot (visual artist), 2022, as part of the artist’s research into his work Regain.

Podcast to listen to here

Julia Morlot’s installation Regain was presented as part of the group exhibition Cum Panis : Le pain et ses écologies at 19, Crac de Montbéliard from 10 February to 5 May 2024.
<Duration: 8 min 56
Editing: Michaël Santos

As part of the exhibition Cum Panis: bread and its ecologies, artist Lexie Smith is offering you the chance to take home a packet of dehydrated sourdough.

Each packet of sourdough is genetically identical, but will evolve as you bring it back to life. The biological exchange between you and sourdough is two-way: you shape it and it shapes you. Anyone who picks up and maintains a packet of sourdough becomes bound by both the practice and the microbiology.

This sourdough was born in New York in 2014. Packets like the ones available here have already been distributed to nearly 2,000 people in 35 other countries. Your pack will keep indefinitely in a dry place until you’re ready to use it.

Guide to using sourdough:
More information on Bread on earth

Raising a sourdough, listen here.
20’40, 2023

Marie Preston with Cécile Berthellot, Jean-François Berthellot, Julie Bertrand, Émile Blaque, Vincent Dufresne, Stéphane Marrou, Lucas Mersh, Delphine Sicard, Lauriane Mietton, Kristel Moinet, Marie Preston, Delphine Sicard, Axel Wurtz, Denis Cassan and Camille Vindras.

Production and editing: Marie Preston
Sound recording: Mathilde Chenin
Sound design: Collective performance orchestrated by Denis Cassan and Marie Preston.

“Raising a sourbough” was produced following a year of participatory research called “CO3 Levain”, bringing together researchers, bakers, facilitators, trainers, craftspeople and artists associated with INRAe, biocivam 11, Triptolène, the CFA des compagnons du devoir and the Teamed/AIAC research team at the University of Paris 8, as well as Marie Preston’s artistic residency at the Bermuda workshops.

This sound montage gives an account of our collective research process, sharing our motivations for doing participatory research, our relationship with sourdough and our practices of mutual maintenance, the political perspective from which we view our practices and our joint research, our reflections on its transmission and the research question that will accompany us over the next few years. The cooperative artistic dimension has been an integral part of our year’s work, and has played a part in the research itself. Various forms have emerged, this being one of them.

Thank you to the Bermuda workshops (Bénédicte le Pimpec, Guillaume Robert, Maxime Bondu and Mathilde Chenin), to Myriam Treiber, to the participants in the three workshops of the emerging Levain project, and to the Co-Construction of Knowledge (CO3) scheme. This work (ID2200-020) was supported by LabEx AGRO 2011-LABX-002, part of the Isite Muse project coordinated by Agropolis Fondation.

To mark the opening of the Box du Noël and the work Fugitive by Émilie Soumba, 19 Crac was delighted to host three concerts programmed by Stéphane Prigent, curator of the exhibition Fais-le toi-même si t’es pas content: Secret Signals (Paris), État Glaise (Mulhouse) and LordxGonzo (Belfort) for an evening of electronic, noise, ambient and sound poetry.

Concerts recorded by Mulhouse experimental radio P-Node on Friday 1 December 2023.
Listen again here: https://p-node.org/broadcasts/fltmstpc


Photo credit Émeline Henckel.