The Halikonlahti Green Art Trilogy, Salo Artmuseum, Finland in 2011.
Limppu is traditional Finnish bread made from sourdough and rye flour. The process takes 3 days and involves awakening the bacterias in the sourdough by adding rye and water. In Finland they keep their sourdough in beautiful wooden buckets. The dough dries on the side of the bucket and by adding water the microorganisms magically wake up to create another batch of bread.
For this workshop at the Salo Artmuseum I baked limppu with Mikko Kivelä and gave a talk about Bread as Social Sculpture and showed the films Alchemy – the poetics of Bread and Aish – bread as life. This was not a workshop on how to bake limppu. (I am sure there are plenty of experienced bakers out there that could do that job a lot better than me.) Like my other bread work I explore the aesthetic process of baking that reconnects nature, culture and the senses and I am particularly interested in the process of fermentation. The baking, rising, sensing, handling and sharing stories and thoughts along the way moves the bread baking into an artistic experience. A social fermentation in the making; a symbiosis of history, embedded experience, microorganisms, quality ingredients, energy and sharing.
