The Bread of Desire is a participatory artistic project that takes shape from a simple and universal gesture like shaping bread. However, Ilaria Turba's breads not only contain flour, water, and yeast, but also dreams, memories, and common aspirations. In a time marked by fragmentation and uncertainty, the symbolic and community value of the ritual breads of the Mediterranean is exalted with an artistic and social act capable of generating empathy and listening.

The exhibition Ilaria Turba. The Bread of Desire marks the final phase of a long journey through territories, communities, and desires. After years of meetings and exchanges, the artist returns to the public the profound sense of a collective and transformative experience. The project starts in 2018 in the northern neighborhoods of Marseille, where, as an artist associated with the national theater LE ZEF, Ilaria Turba activates a series of workshops with the local community. In this context, over a hundred sculpture-breads are born: unique forms, collectively created and inspired by the desires of those who participate. Starting from 2022, The Bread of Desire transforms into a journey through Italy, where each stop involves museums, festivals, local associations, and residents. From Milan to Fontecchio, from Florence to Castiglione delle Stiviere, to the medieval stone village of Ghesc in Piedmont, each place becomes an opportunity to regenerate the gesture, activate a new dialogue with the communities, and create new forms.

The final Italian stage of the itinerant project takes place in the village of Villaurbana, in the province of Oristano, as part of the program of the Sardegna AR/S Foundation - Shared Art. It is in Sardinia, a land deeply connected to the tradition of ritual bread, that the project finds its symbolic completion: a return to matter, memory, and gestures that unite. During a collective festive ritual in the forest of S'Arangiu Aresti, the artist shared the stories related to each of the over a hundred breads collected along the journey, before they were entrusted to the fire in a symbolic gesture of transformation. Like in ancient rituals, their metamorphosis does not signify an end, but a passage of rebirth. The shiny black powder derived from the combustion becomes, thus, a symbol of desires losing their shape and blending together. As the artist states in the video on display, "the forms that disappear remain in memory, in traces, in stories that can still be passed on. They have not disappeared, they have only returned to their essence, which is the same as the desires from which everything began".