Walking loaves

Walking loaves
Luca Trevisani
NERO Editions
Italian and English
230 pages
2023

Walking loaves is a cannibalization of and homage to “Bread of Dreams,” the masterpiece of the Italian philologist, anthropologist, and literary critic Piero Camporesi. First published in 1980, “Bread of Dreams” is a book about bread as a social subject, bread-making, rituals of the past, and how we used to eat. In attempting to crystalize in his sculptures the act of walking and the metamorphosis of the body, Luca Trevisani devoted several practices of shoemaking to bread, emphasized as collective glue, physical history, and organic writing. After three years of hands-on and literary study of bread, Luca Trevisani pays homage to Camporesi, grafting images of his works and written notes onto his anastatic replica: a mutation grown in the gaps of another book, with a gesture that is both kind and aggressive.

The book Walking loaves is linked to the installation/performance “Ai piedi del pane” presented by Xing in the Oplà. Performing Activities series at Arte Fiera 2022. For Trevisani, bread is history’s most important technological object. In an act of cultural archeology that ironically challenged the hierarchies of material values, Luca Trevisani had made shoes to put on and walk in, a sort of artistic stress test.