Sweat Dough

2025
Sweat, wheat, grain mill, a body
Dimensions variable

To make a basic dough, one needs: flour, water, salt, and fermenting microbes. To obtain the flour, one plants the wheat, harvests it, and mills the grain. Or, one purchases a bag. To obtain the other three ingredients, one goes to a grocery store again. Or, one can sweat.

In Marx’s critique of capitalism, labor is transformed into a commodity – not only through the abstraction of labor into labor-power bought and sold on the market, but also through the reduction of concrete, embodied activity into a means of producing commodities. The project Sweat Dough stages the encounter between the end product of capitalized labor and the by-product of time- and site-specific bodily activity. The artist mills 130 pounds of purchased wheat berries and collects the sweat produced during the process. The sweat is then mixed with the freshly milled flour.

There are more questions to be asked. As sweat leaves the body, as it acts as the agent of fermentation, is the labor extended? How do we reconnect to the collective labor embedded in the thousands of years of co-evolution between crop and human? How do we face the uniform apparatuses – mills, packaging, monocultures – that mediate every part of the process?