At LACA, Lúcia Prancha continues her exploration of production and labor by exercising the tension between text and image, video and printed media. The presentation features an original artist book, a series of printed materials, and sound recordings based on the script “The Bread-King Learns to Bake Bread” by Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) and the artist’s experiences with Los Angeles baker Roxana Jullapat. The concurrent narratives of Brecht and Jullapat create the structure for the book and the film.

Bertolt Brecht arrived in California as an exile in December 1941 where he wrote the script, yet it was never used. Brecht’s text implies questions of time, production, consumption, mechanical and manual labor. Prancha found the Brecht text while living in Los Angeles and views it as a critique of the so-called American Consumer Society, in this case, from the immigrant point of view.

-HL
5/16/19

More on the event at LACA can be found here.