On October 8, 2023, my father succumbed to a sudden illness, plunging me into the abyss of loss. Faced with the vastness of the beyond, words fell silent, powerless, and only tears could express the unspeakable. They became a wounded language, a universal, ancestral, and ephemeral tongue. They also emerged as a feminine form of writing, rooted in the practices of ancient mourners. These women, through their laments and bodies gripped by emotion, gave shape to collective grief in a physical language that transcended the limits of speech. This fluid and visceral writing crosses the boundaries of the visible and the unspeakable, transforming the body into a surface of expression and pain into an act of creation.

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To give tangible and lasting form to this pain, I established a cathartic ritual: after each torrent of tears, I shape a mask of my crying face, made of bread. This ritual, repetitive and deeply rooted in the body, becomes a meditative act of processing my suffering. It is a transformation, where the ephemeral—my tears—becomes a material form that captures the moment and transcends the pain.

Each mask is unique, a snapshot of a precise emotional moment, a singular imprint of the sorrow that shaped it. Yet in every mask, the same phenomenon occurs: my face seems erased by the tears, reduced to a smooth surface where only my swollen eyes remain. These eyes, distorted by crying, take on an uncanny resemblance to breasts, udders, or tumors, inscribing the female body within a territory of excess, creation, and transformation.

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The masks, round or oval in shape, vary in size, texture, and color. Some are golden from baking, luminous like scars in the process of healing, while others, scorched in places, bear visible traces of raw, almost unbearable intensity. This diversity reflects the plurality of emotions within me: the ephemeral, the inconsistent, and the unpredictable, embodied in these fragile, imperfect objects.

The choice of bread as a material amplifies the cathartic dimension of this ritual. In English, “pain” means suffering, while in French, it signifies bread, this fundamental food, a symbol of sustenance and sharing. Shaping bread becomes a therapeutic act. The phrase “bake your pain” evokes the symbolic process of kneading, forming, and transforming suffering through the oven’s heat. Bread, a humble and universal substance, anchors my grief in a daily gesture, both mundane and profoundly sacred.

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This ritual, repetitive yet always unique, extends this feminine form of writing, one of fluidity, resilience, and transformation. Like the mourners of old, my masks reinvent the language of mourning, blurring the boundaries between the personal and the collective, between loss and creation. They interrogate the female body, its transformations, its symbols, and its ability to transcend pain, becoming a universal and intimate language. Through this practice, my grief finds an outlet, a space where it transforms, becoming both memory and creation.

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