Event Blog 2: Collective Bread Diaries: A Taste of Protest

May 13, 2018

During Week 1, I had the opportunity to attend Haytham Nawar’s exhibit, Collective Bread Diaries: A Taste of Protest. In his exhibit, Nawar asked people around the world to sketch a picture of the bread in their home country using Amazon Mechanical Turk, and compiled the sketches he got into a collection. He told us about how in Egypt, holding up a loaf of bread was a sign of protest, and he noticed that the kind of bread eaten in different regions has some political significance. For example, many people from countries that had been colonized by France drew a baguette, despite the fact that this may not have been the bread that originated from their area. This example demonstrates how politics and world events influence the spread of culture and thus, the spread of the types of bread eaten in different regions. Nawar’s art unites art and science, existing not in either the cultures of science or humanities, as described by C.P Snow’s two cultures, but instead exists in the third culture described by Kelly, because he utilized a mechanical cutting machine and replaced the blade with a pen in order to recreate his sketches. However, I think that Benjamin may not have liked this exhibit as much, because the bread being recreated by the printer caused it to lose some detail and many of the breads to look very similar. I liked this exhibit, but I wanted more information from it. For example, I wondered where each bread came from, why people drew that kind of bread, what memories that kind of bread held for them, and why that kind of bread is important to them. In my family, we have an Easter bread that my grandma bakes every year and takes to her church to be blessed by the priest. The bread is always tall and round, and usually has some sort of design on the top to make it special. We then break the bread during the Easter meal as a symbol of Christ. I know many other cultures must have some sort of cultural significance behind their bread, and it would have been nice to know some more context to add to my understanding of how the bread has a political background of protest. Adding descriptions or quotes from each artist would have been a unique extension of the art, allowing for more context. However, I can also understand how Nawar may have wished for the viewer to use their imagination to think about the bread and ponder it, rather than having all the answers right there for them. Due to this exhibit, I now wonder how this idea of bread as a symbol of protest could be applied to the protests at UCLA this week. As many of these people work in food service at the dorms, the lack of food in the dining halls is serving as a symbol of their protest. Clearly, there is a tie between hunger and protest, which has been highlighted by this exhibit.