My intercultural biography informs the creation of communicational spaces in several world cities such as the projects I created at Poilâne Bakery in Paris. I am interested in the way immigrants invest their cultural imagination in a new homeland - carving out a space for themselves and their families, transforming it, nourishing it, assimilating elements from it – and making the space richer, fuller.

In "Cultures & Ferments", I used a bakery shop to map the workspace of foreigners inthe urban environment. I produced the project in collaboration with immigrant bakers from Spain, Portugal, Peru and Greece. Vicente, Felix, Marcel, Percy, Patrick and myself spent three years producing bread-bowls for several projects at Poilane Bakery. I have used the bread-bowls as a motif in a number of ways in several works dealing with urban culture between 1995 and 2001.

For the "Cultures & Ferments" project 5 bakers and myself carved slices from sculpturesreminiscent of leavened (fermented) bread-dough. These gestures resonate by suggesting the social space immigrants carve for themselves in a new homeland, through work.

The project brings to mind Julia Kristeva's claims: "Immigrants, hence workers. (...) The foreigner still considers work as a value. A vital necessity, to be sure, his sole means of survival, on which he does not necessarily place a halo of glory but simply claims as a primary right, the zero degree of dignity. (...) a universally tried and tested stock for the wanderer's use." (Kristeva: “Strangers to Ourselves”).

Poilâne Bakery: http://www.poilane.com/pages/en/company_culture.php