Pane Quotidiano

Pane Quotidiano focuses on the accumulation of plastic waste along the Venetian shoreline, its gradual transformation into microplastics, and their silent return to our tables through common ingredients like salt and water. The artist sheds light on a global issue that touches her both personally and geographically. With this work, she aims to make the invisible visible — placing on the plate the increasingly alarming presence of microplastics in our seas, the consequence of direct and indirect human actions.

Vanessa Carlesso Bortignon’s work captures the precarious and unstable nature of our present.If what we ask of art today is to lean into uncomfortable, unsheltered terrain, then this project becomes not only plausible — but necessary. It speaks to the role of art in our times: concrete, material, and rooted in the lived realities of individuals and communities.

The artist confronts the flattening effects of hyper-consumerism, offering a critical provocation around the act of consumption, the need to consume, and the pleasures it falsely promises. Her research began after reading a study estimating that each person ingests about 5 grams of microplastics per week — the equivalent of one credit card every seven days. This alarming data led her to create a loaf of bread, kneaded with water and plastic fragments collected from the beaches of Venice.Using ingredients that appear simple and familiar, the artist activates a sharp reflection on one of the most urgent threats to our ecosystems and to human health: plastic waste.

In Pane Quotidiano, food becomes the spokesperson — a symbolic and tangible medium through which the viewer is invited to reconsider everyday gestures. The bread becomes a metaphor for both body and home, both of which are now pervasively contaminated by the remnants of our own behavior.