Pasta Madre

The project Pasta Madre was first inspired by the Christian celebration of Saint Joseph in Sicily, in the past a pagan celebration of the spring. Several women from different villages gather together in a house and create thousands of little bread sculptures, used to decorate Saint Joseph’s altar. After the celebration the breads are given to the public as symbol of fortune and prosperity in the new solar year.

Pasta Madre is a project consisting of a series of sculptures and photographs of the artist’s head in bread left to crumble in different ways. The decomposition results of each head are recorded and preserved with different materials and techniques that transform the biological process of decomposition into an artistic one. The trace of the head, the relation with time, the metamorphosis of the material, of the form and of the image creates an “obeying” fossil to the law of the artist in a process of crystallization half way between improvisation and scientific method.