Boja Fauss

In mid-nineteenth-century Turin, legend has it that, among the forms of discourtesy reserved by the people for the executioner, bakers would hand him the bread upside down as a form of contempt and evil eye. Local administrators, prompted by the executioner's repeated reports and complaints, issued a city ordinance formally banning this discriminatory practice. So it was that the bakers, in order to circumvent the law with a creative choice, invented a new device with magical and symbolic power, a type of brick-shaped bread: the pancarré. Equal both below and above, the pancarré concealed its message. In the impossibility of recognising the baking side, it could continue to be served upside down, thus exerting its silent power.

The pancarré, today a soft ghost to feed on, would be born at the expense of its food value, to be taken as an instrument of political dissent against a figure perceived as the embodiment of a system in which Justice was publicly ritualised and manifested as an instrument of control. A heterogeneous mixture of elements amalgamates in its mixture: judicial chronicle and popular history, literary writings and archive documents; echoes of a trauma sedimented in the collective memory, but concealed beneath a soft and reassuring surface.