As part of the exhibition Cum Panis: Bread and its Ecologies, Grace Gloria Denis carried out a residency in the Pays d’agglomération de Montbéliard and the surrounding region, where she investigated bread production, working primarily with the peasant-bakers at Fournil de la Modestine in Cornot, Haute Saône, while simultaneously visiting various sites in the territory, distinguishing the relation between geography and food production. More broadly, her work examines the relationship between bread and industry in France, surveying implements of varying scales, ranging from homemade harvest tools to stone mills to military ovens. In the exhibition, Denis convenes an arrangement of agricultural instruments alongside archival references that chart the prevalence of the body in agrarian labor associated with periods of pre-industry, the modifications of these apparatuses to respond to emergent socio-economic and farming challenges, ultimately alluding to the mechanization of these maneuvers in the subsequent industrialization of bread production. The onslaught of industrialization perpetuated by techno-scientific currents in agri-food industries have erased the presence of the body in domains which previously developed specific corporeal choreographies, some of which could now be considered as immaterial patriomony. At Au Fournil de La Modestine, the imperativity of working with and from the body in relation to the bread became increasingly evident. After a series of observations and exchanges, Denis noted the inextricable link between the work of the paysan-boulanger and the notion of sensorial pedagogies; the ears are present in the processing of the grains, the eyes are present in the tending to the oven, the nose examines the odor emitted from the bread, the hands tap the bottom to test if its completed, and finally the mouth confirms its comestiblity. Her work examines the valorisation of sensorial pedagogies in the work of the paysan-boulanger as a means of returning to the presence of the body as a means of resistance to mechanized labor. In conjunction, Denis’s research acknowledges regional histories of infertile land and its economic consequences, alongside the alliances and exchanges they germinated, presented as an edible intervention in the extended program of the exhibition through the baking of pain de munition, in a gesture that reveals local food habits adapted to a context of survival.


Grace Denis’ research residency was supported by the Couleurs de l’Agglo program of Pays d’Agglomération de Montbéliard, and involved the Archives Municipale de la Ville de Montbéliard, the Association du Fort du Mont Bart, Le Fournil de la Modestine, Michotte et Confiote, the Ecole d’art G. Jacot de Belfort, and the collections of the Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation de Besançon and the Musée de Grenoble.