Across 2024 and 2025, Asli Hatipoglu has led a series of sourdough-making workshops that use bread as a way into embodiment, ancestral memory and collective care. Framed around the slow, living process of sourdough fermentation, these workshops ask what gestures, stories and memories are woven into the act of bread-making, and how preparing dough becomes an act of embodiment and transformation. As participants knead, shape and wait with the dough, they look for the imprint of other bodies, both human and non-human, tangible and imagined, embedded in traditions passed down through generations, and try to rediscover rituals that can nourish the body.
The workshops have taken different forms in different places. For the Bazaar Festival at UMPRUM Kafkárna in Prague, Hatipoglu and Heidi Hornáčková held "Sculptures of Memories," where participants shaped their personal histories into bread sculptures through a tactile, reflective practice. At Kunstverein Bielefeld, as part of the DenkenFühlenHandeln Festival, she led "Let's Get Sour," a fermentation workshop on sourdough bread and embodiment that connected baking to questions of social sustainability and collective cohesion.
Throughout, bread becomes more than food: a shared material through which people reflect, remember and discover new ways of being together.