Spring 2024: Baking circle conversations – Bread and Circuses, and …


Join us for an engaging and hands-on baking circle where we mix ingredients, thoughts and feelings, exploring questions of life, death, bread and being human on this planet in this time! Welcome to CEMUS or join us online and bake from home! Starting May 2.

Concept initiated and developed by Ryan Carolan with support from Daniel Mossberg.

When: May 2 and May 22 at 12.15-14.00 CET, and NEW DATE June 5 at 13.15-15.00 CET

Where: CEMUS Library, Geocentrum, Villavägen 16, see map here https://link.mazemap.com/gVZ978v2

Online: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/61984859923

How: Bring your own baking equipment and ingredients if you want to bake or just join the conversation, we provide an oven and good company

Registration: https://doit.medfarm.uu.se/bin/kurt3/kurt/101261


Ryan Carolan is a CEFO affiliate, PhD researcher and candidate at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, residing in Uppsala, and experienced sourdough slow-baker with focus on philosophy, education and democracy.

Daniel Mossberg is lead outreach coordinator at CEMUS with a wide range of firsthand experience of student-led education and processes, experienced facilitator and organizer of conversations on existential issues, big and small, and lifelong amateur baker steeped in the Swedish bread traditions.


Concept and background by Ryan

Many people are living or have lived through violent and traumatic events that are beyond words. And yet, just because these experiences are beyond words, they still have to be spoken about, they have to be remembered, and they have to be understood, since we have to continue to live after the shockwave of the event has sedimented into our being.

And yet, as research is now confirming, words are rarely enough to process traumatic experiences, since these experiences are stored deep within structure of the body, ‘exiled to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness’, as Stephen Cope puts it.

How can we respond to this reality?
With the enormity of global crises facing humanity symbolised by the ecological crisis and the brutal fact that humanity is failing to respond effectively, this is an extremely important question. The obvious danger is that, under the shadow of this enormous challenge that is largely beyond comprehension, the powers that be responds in an Orwellian way by calling night day, further disconnecting us from our embodied experience and our deepest feelings.

Following the passing of my son from a rare genetic disease on the 30th of December 2022, sourdough has become a way for me to cultivate life that I was otherwise denied. It has become a metaphor of life and a way of channeling my pain into an ancient practice that brings joy.

Bread and circuses and… is an attempt to create a space where the incomprehensible may be glimpsed, if only for a moment, through making bread and circuses. Fundamentally, it is premised on the assumption that only by reconnecting with our deepest feeling can we come to terms with what it means to be human in an age of impending ecological and social collapse. With this knowledge, it may be possible to respond more effectively to violent and traumatic events, and, possibly, break the conditions and cycles reproducing them.