Bread and Circuses

Bread and Circuses is a speculative satirical video set in a near future, where a charismatic influencer hosts a surreal cooking show teaching how to make “Mediterranean bread” using seawater. At first playful and ironic, the show gradually reveals a darker truth: the ocean is contaminated, the recipe is toxic, and what was meant to nourish is now dangerous. With a pop aesthetic and grotesque humour, artist Anne Fehres critiques humanity’s impact on the Mediterranean, questioning our relationship with digital culture, environmental awareness, and superficial sustainability narratives. The title is taken from Juvenal’s Satire X, where “bread and circuses” symbolise distraction and spectacle. Fehres flips this concept, transforming the cooking show — today’s digital circus — into a space of ecological discomfort and awareness. Through exaggerated gestures, animated graphics, and scripted absurdity, Bread and Circuses forces viewers to reflect: how long can we keep consuming without consequences? What happens when even beauty becomes inedible? The work underscores the urgent need for ocean literacy, showing how art can take scientific knowledge out of research labs and into the cultural space — making it visible, felt, and shared.