PANIFICE means 'bread-making', and plays on words like artifice and edifice. The artwork PANIFICE begins with two breads intended to multiply to 'feed five thousand people'. The one bread is subtexted in Latin: Aut quis est ex vobis homo, quem si petierit filius suus panem, numquid lapidem porriget ei?(Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask for bread, will he give him a stone? - Matthew 7:9). The other bread has the same text in Zulu: Noma ngumuphi umuntu kini ongathi, uma indodana yakhe icela isinkwa, ayinike itshe?

 

An identical pair of breads, with the same texts will be placed in storage. There are more than four hundred tongues in the world that currently have a written style, often in a unique alphabet. Two breads are to be made in each language. The breads that are sold will help pay for the ones stored up so that, in the end, there will be a grand banquet where more than four hundred breads are shared together.

 

The work offers a chance for languages that find it hard to associate to 'break bread together', to begin a companionship, or to keep company - in Latin com- is 'together' and panis, 'bread'. The idea is to put dis-enfranchised languages on the same table as the established, privileged ones. Conceptually the work questions the licence and responsibility exercised by the so-called 'privileged' tongues over the so-called 'neglected' or 'unprivileged' ones. The first pair of breads is in Latin and Zulu because there is a healthy/unhealthy debate raging at present in South African academic circles about the validity of Latin as an ingredient in studies in the human sciences, especially in legal subjects.