Nuestra Senora del Pan executes durational performance pieces employing time, yeast, sugar, flour, water, oil, fire and sweat. Nuestra Senora del Pan celebrates the peasant and the domestic.
Peasant life is under attack all over the world. Fishing villages and Farmland are under constant attack by real estate developers and urban sprawl. Since the industrial revolution, local peasants moved to urban centres while peasant immigrants and refugees travelled to cities in far away countries. In recent times, multi-corporations obliterate peasant life without actually moving the peasants themselves – witness the at-home computer data entry workers in Wales and the illegal immigrant seamstresses in Mexico or Saskatchewan.
RISING is bread making performed in front of videotape of my former fishing village of Finn Slough in Richmond, BC situated on the south arm of the Fraser River. For me, the ritual of making bread is a celebration of peasant life. Bread takes time. Bread never comes out the same way twice. Bread requires you to be at home. Bread fails if you rush it. Bread sometimes fails for no reason at all – it is mysterious.
Bread making is ultimately a subversive act.