{
  "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1",
  "title": "Gianluca Giabardo: Writing",
  "home_page_url": "https://www.gianlucagiabardo.com/writing/",
  "feed_url": "https://www.gianlucagiabardo.com/writing/feed.json",
  "description": "Essays on design, research, making, and living-with",
  "language": "en",
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Gianluca Giabardo",
      "url": "https://www.gianlucagiabardo.com"
    }
  ],
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "https://www.gianlucagiabardo.com/writing/a-baker-is-a-researcher/",
      "url": "https://www.gianlucagiabardo.com/writing/a-baker-is-a-researcher/",
      "title": "A baker is a researcher is a baker",
      "summary": "I've spent the last five years navigating this space of practice-led research together with sourdough.",
      "content_text": "What happens when a researcher is a baker is a researcher?\n\nI've spent the last years navigating this space of practice-led research together with sourdough. Panicuocoli, a small organic sourdough bakery in Helsinki, has been the practice for my doctoral research at Aalto University. The bakery is the research site and bread is my methodology.\nNow I'm moving forward with the thesis on what I call [symbiotic conviviality](/research), while also building [a software for small local sourdough bakeries](/bakeryos) that embraces complexity rather than trying to eliminate it.\n\n![Wood-fired oven](/images/writing/wood-oven-fire.jpg)\n\nI'll share here how, with bread, I came to think differently about design, making, and co-existence.",
      "date_published": "2026-06-12T00:00:00.000Z",
      "tags": [
        "bread",
        "research",
        "bakeryos"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "https://www.gianlucagiabardo.com/writing/eating-the-land/",
      "url": "https://www.gianlucagiabardo.com/writing/eating-the-land/",
      "title": "Eating the land",
      "summary": "Different farm, different mill, different harvest, different bread. On working with grain variability, heritage flour, and what terroir means for a baker.",
      "content_text": "Different farm, different mill, different weather, different harvest = not the same bread.\n\nBread cannot always taste the same, as plastic-bagged bread has accustomed us to, bread should taste, feel and melt in the mouth as the land and the grains that make it.\nWhat could have been perceived as an inconsistency in ingredient qualities became the core of my work and research\n\n![Rye loaves in the oven](/images/writing/rye-loaves-oven.jpg)\n\nAt Panicuocoli, controlling these variations proved futile and exhausting.\nInstead, we work with them. When we were delivered a new rye variety, we adapted fermentation times and hydration; when the wheat dough became more extensible, we adjusted our mixing and the blend of flours we used.\nThis is what I call \"eating the land\" and what I am trying to define as [co-existing survivals](/research): modes of making that depend on cooperation between human intentions and others' agencies.\nThe sourdough cultures, the seasonal rhythms, the farmers' decisions, the bakery, the hands, ... all present to allow bread to emerge each day.\n\n![Wheat loaves](/images/writing/wheat-loaves-grid.webp)\n\nDesign as (is) co-existence, not mastery and control.",
      "date_published": "2026-05-29T00:00:00.000Z",
      "tags": [
        "bread",
        "practice",
        "research"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "https://www.gianlucagiabardo.com/writing/how-it-all-started/",
      "url": "https://www.gianlucagiabardo.com/writing/how-it-all-started/",
      "title": "How it all started",
      "summary": "How discovering fatherhood led to sourdough bread baking: a personal story of learning to make bread, finding new sensibilities, and opening a bakery.",
      "content_text": "A few years ago our first daughter was born. We all kind of know how that happens, but when the idea, and the baby, starts to take form inside another body the reality of it might arrive at you differently. It came to me with baking bread.\n\nSomehow, to be(come) a father I absolutely needed to learn how to bake bread, good bread, at home.\n\n![Bread selfie](/images/writing/bread-selfie.jpg)\n\nI had mixed and baked a few loaves with fresh yeast, I also tried different ways of doing it. But it was always average tasting, looking, and not much fun altogether.\n\nBut I needed to fulfil that (primordial?) need to feed, take care, and be there. Learning how to bake with sourdough was my way to prepare to get ready. But (of course) I wasn't; I mean bread was ok by the time she was born, but it's something else to be ready to be a parent.\n\nOnly through doing it many many times, and I mean baking, I learned that baking is not only a practice of attuning to the way the others that make the bread are, but also a sort of therapeutic process that involves time, care, new sensibilities and attentions.\n\nI went on to be a baker opening [Panicuocoli](/practice) (now closed) and a father to a second child.\n\nI only recently have been able to restart my home-baking after refusing to touch dough for months after shutting the bakery doors. Call it trauma, recovery, reassessing, or burnout; yet baking is still therapeutic, eating your own bread is still the most liberating experience, and seeing how everyone else in the family enjoys it is the best encouragement to keep fermenting.\n\nI've been thinking for a long time I would like to write about bread, its meanings, bread culture and cultures. \nAnd as I started baking again, I also started writing.\n\nThis is a very short way of telling a longer story, that goes tangentially in many directions,\nbut it's a start",
      "date_published": "2026-05-08T00:00:00.000Z",
      "tags": [
        "bread",
        "personal"
      ]
    }
  ]
}