To explore the collective and affective memory related to bread, integrating the words and testimonies of Évora’s inhabitants to start a participatory archive, is the main objective of project ‘Trigo Lentejado Bom: collective and affective memories of Alentejo bread in Évora’, developed from scratch in less than a week during IN2PAST’s first Doctoral School.

The ‘In2Future Boot Camp: Towards an Ecology of Heritage Practices’, held in Évora between May 18 and 24, 2024, in partnership with Festival Imaterial and Évora 27 – European Capital of Culture, and which brought together 33 PhD students from the seven research units that make up the IN2PAST consortium.

This video is the result of a transdisciplinary collective work carried out by seven researchers studying Music and Musicology, History, Memory and Tangible Culture, History of Art, History of Science, Chemistry, Museology, Cultural Heritage Studies, Institutional History, Cultural History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Geology and Archaeometry.

In order to respond to the challenge of (re)thinking the techniques and devices of archiving or cultural transmission that constitute heritage, underlying the notion of the anarchive, and contemplating the motto of Évora_27 – the affirmation of VAGAR as another art of existence for Humanity – the ‘Trigo Lentejado Bom’ team chose to valorise the bread from Alentejo (‘pão alentejano’) as cultural heritage, recognising in it the ancestral wisdom that sees time as an ally, not an adversary.

In the street, they asked people about their relationship with bread, mapping their stories and memories, with the aim of creating a micro-history which, through different imaginaries – those of the flour, the labour, the mill, the identity, the chemistry, the starch and the fermentation – is transformed into a macro-history about the construction of a collective and affective memory around bread.

This project’s first public presentation took place at the Garcia de Resende Theatre, in Évora, on May 24th, 2024, as part of the boot camp/Festival Imaterial’s session ‘Heritage Anarchives in Évora: Towards an Ecology of Practices’.