Charcoal, flour, olfaction, and poetics of rupture. 

Bread as Vector introduces a sculptural piece in which charcoal matter is shaped through the form and process of baking, approximating two ancestral matters, flour and earth, and their relationship to life. The work materialises the paradoxes of sustenance, memory, and violence: charcoal dust and flour are mixed into carbonised breads, while the smell of fresh-baked bread saturates the exhibition space. A contradiction arises between what the eyes perceive and what the nose senses. Bread is bio-political. It is a primary resource whose availability is shaped by forces of war, conflict, economic instability, and climate across the globe. Wheat links vast regions and populations through international food systems, held in the tension between abundance and vulnerability. Disruptions through occupation, blockades, market volatility, or environmental disasters expose the fragility of the agricultural, infrastructural, and social networks required to sustain life. Blocked exports, ruined fields, and weaponised access to harvests turn wheat, flour, and bread into sites of both struggle and resilience.

The work is activated through the sensorial of smell as it inhabits the exhibition space. In Bread as Vector, bread becomes an object of contemplation, investigating the infrastructures behind making and survival, and materialising the tension of sustenance shaped by uncertainty and violence.