MAY 27-30, 2021 JENISCH MUSEUM
The work, composed of the ceramic molds and the baked breads, will be on display at the Jenisch Museum, while backstage images and a poem-recipe piece are available below.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
A baking-based artistic endeavor inspired by the words of Swedish poet Edith Södergran (1892–1923) in her poem “Hope”, when she describes the rising dough and her frustrations with its height, stating “Before I Die I Shall Bake a Cathedral”. Ongoing since 2016, the project takes its form in a variety of ways, but always grounded in the artist’s overall practice driven by her interests in exhibition design, museum function, and architectural history. The project plays with actual possibilities of baking an existing building that symbolize power within current art communities — instead of a cathedral. Challenging our sensory and intellectual perceptions, her process raised questions like: should it be a museum, another type of art institution, the gallery, or perhaps the artist’s studio? And what ritualistic and hierarchical transformation happens when you get to eat these buildings? It’s a material investigation on converging components of dough and construction, baking and building, exploring the crossroad between material, function, and idea. The work involves the use of ceramic molds based on art institution’s architectural references that were made by the artist for the Jenisch Museum in collaboration with Guillaume Ediger and baking actual breads with them in collaboration with baker Melanie Wehrli in Vevey.
https://www.fromtheforestsashes.com
Photos: Gal Sherizly and Marie Capesius
- How to Eat a Museum -
Find a museum that tickles your fancy, whose potential mouthfeel interests you, that you would like to taste. What of its qualities would you like to sample?
I now want you to explore the building and its context. Is it a building of power for your communities today? Or does it delve in the past? Does it only have one function or many? What powers does it hold that you would like to acquire through eating it?
Get close to the building, smell it, run its corners between your fingertips, taste it with your tongue.
Make an imitation of the part of the building in clay in 1:1 scale, the part that got stuck in your senses. Let the clay dry and burn it in a kiln.
Find a bucket. Use flour, water, salt and yeast - mimic the museums texture, colour, tension and meaning. Mix it together and work it into the dough through kneading it like an aching body for as long as it takes to loosen its tension.
Put it to bed by folding it twice and put a towel on the bucket. Let the dough rest for a few hours and grow in size. Take it out of its bucket by gently patting it and moving it out if its rest to a floured table. Fold it gently a few times to make it wake up and move it into a shape that would fit into the clay form you previously made.
Put the clay form in the oven and preheat it to 250 degrees. Take out the form and gently put your dough in the form. Put it all back in the oven and lower the temperature to 200 degrees.
Let the bread bake in the oven for about 30 mins until its inner temperature is about 93 degrees. It is now ready to take out of the oven. Does it smell like you remember your museum to smell? Does it look like it has the same texture?
When the bread has cooled down a little you should be able to take it out of the form, keeping the shape of the chosen part of your museum.
Let it cool fully. This is such an important part of the breads creation that is rarely spoken about: the setting stage when it fully develops its true form. Once it has cooled down it is time to for the eating to commence. Break off part of the block and taste it, preferably while watching the museum in front of you.
Does it hold the sensory and intellectual qualities you longed for? Or are you longing for something else? Would you like art to take place and be valued in a different space?
You are now eating your museum. Hope you find its taste and texture strengthening.
- by Louise Waite -
This written piece is part of the project Before I Die I Shall Bake a Museum by artist Louise Waite (se). For almost a year she has been preparing to bake Musée Jenisch Vevey in Switzerland for foodculture days. In May 2021 she hopes her efforts will come to fruition through the hands of the people of Vevey.
