Prometheus_lab, Borca di Cadore (2026)

25/08/2025

IGP_4 xilogenetica

Index for a Gastronomy of Potential is a residency programme for chefs of aiming to explore the Dolomitic landscape through its edibles working with a thick network of farmers, artisans and experts of the mountains and their multifaceted knowledge. Following the words of one of them, IGP rejects the idea of gastronomic tradition as a never changin fossil, the comfortable and satisfying framework for the mindless visitor of the mountain.
IGP is supported by .unipd and

The fourth edition intersects the broader research started as part of "xilogenesi" collaboration of TESAF and DC where prometheus_ explores the edible potential of arboreal plants included in the xiloteque of the Centre for the Alpine Studies of the University of Padova.

We evaluate the possibility of introducing unexpected and neglected parts of these trees into a local gastronomy, pushing the boundaries of what is considered edible in the mountain landscape. Leaves, flowers, pollens, fruits, barks, hashes, berries, pine needles and cones, saps, branches and roots, pushed aside in the dark of the wood. Left to mycelia and litofagi insects. We don't re enact a past history, but rather provide new meanings where there wasn't any, open new paths where evolution haven't yet been. We search the forest for more bits to toss into the combinatorial game of what humans eat shaping in continuous the world. Novel meanings for diverse ways of interpreting the the management of forests, of mountain landscape at large. New products of an eco-nomy that shares methods and objectives with eco-logy, Nomos and Logos.

IGP expands the narrow reality, programming novel tastes from the blank space of evolutionary remoteness, bubbles of never walked potentials. Intelligences of the generative artifice.

"Xilogenetica" mutates the approach of a speculative genetics running backwards the paths of the traditions' evolution reactivating the myriad of never-realised possibilities yet still probable.

This year residents are:

04/08/2025

Xilogenesi is a project of and .unipd (supported by PNRR funds) for the restoration and dissemination of the 19th century xiloteque of the Centre for Alpine Studies of the University of Padova.
It is the activation of a dormant heritage, yet still able to spark curiosity and generate novel strands of knowledge. The project involves more than 40 artists in the effort of reimagining the role and fruition of the xiloteque through a contemporary understanding of the matter. The skillful restoration of the surviving pieces of the collection is now joined by an even bigger corpus of pieces of art.
entered the challenge bringing to the conversation our long research on the edibility of neglected forest plants in the Dolomites. With we will be focusing on edible parts of forestry arboreal plants of the Dolomites, introducing leaves, flowers, pollen, pine needles and cones and even barks and woody parts to the table. Local and less local food companies will be involved in the design and production of new foods across the process, introducing novel tastes and with them a more diverse way of understanding the forest, of imagining multiple, unexpected, sustainable economies related to its management.

08/04/2025

fodinichnias are traces left by organisms on sediments as a result of searching for food. Different species produce specific patterns reflecting the development of specific strategies for feeding. Faults where natural and artificial layers meet and overlap. Geology is a natural science (even closer to biology than one could think) but can as well belongs to humanities. An ethnogeology that read those traces that built a landscape, that investigatess the domestication of rocks. Stone shepherds organise lithic structures, splinters composed in functional shapes and adaptation tools. Terraces to support otherwise precarious fertile soil on slopes, trails, roads and buildings.
Quarries and gardens are the same thing.

29/11/2024

Gemmazione 2024,
It might seem we're carrying a coffin, yet this is not a requiem.
Nothing dies here, everything is transformed, processed and digested in the innards of the Colonia. It has to. We migrate and colonise spaces, while shifting meanings and uses of spaces and objects in the moving.
Gemmazione is Italian for budding yet we don't generate clones, genetically identical organisms, we grow and transform everything. Ourselves first. After seven years disn't migrate from its original location to another, it spread. As part of a macrobiome we keep building by redefining the nature of things. Colonia. Budding also as the complex process of generating friends, buddies, a kin without whom nothing would have been possible. The network of beings, knowledge, skills, minds that inject life into this vision. Thanks to , the inoculator.
We're now filling another niche, opening other routes and exploring other spaces. Breathing new dust (mainly yellow, because of that precedes us). .si.ta documented the delicate process, taking out the emotionality were I pretended ther wasn't any. .paolodalpont covered the most iconic steps, the moving of a 300kilos table that is the central piece of the lab. was particularly lazy, hanging from his new climbing wall, but sent Mattia, Lorenzo and a bunch of students to help while cooking his amatriciana that we eventually manage to have a taste of. .tallo, .aura_syrbe carried loads of things I didn't even remember having collected. .collarin removed the biggest tick we both had ever seen from my finger (another negotiation, another budding). brought light and water that should never go together, but he knows how. Many others helped in many ways, lighting the corridors when dark, paving the road for others to come. Being there as a diverse population.
The network and the colony.
There couldn't have been any prometus_lab in here seven years ago without it, it couldn't have grown, spread, and could hardly keep being.

photos: .si.ta

03/11/2024

Of Prometheus four legends are told.
According to the first, he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.
According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.
According to the third, his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself.
According to the fourth, everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.
There remains the inexplicable mass of rock.
The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.
Franz Kafka, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

The short story from Kafka, a story of stories, of how stories work. Of men, gods and heroes. Of how men tell stories about their gods, their heroes and themselves. Of how values are not immutable or engraved in the stone. Rather written in charcoal, crystals and powder. Heroes burn and fire itself extinguishes.
Only the rock remains, more in its inexplicability than in the actual substance.

The story of these stories was written with charcoal on the wall of our former lab during the last openstudio as a farewell to that space, a trace while moving onto another. It might as well be already gone.

Thank you to .si.ta for documenting the otherwise ephemera and .tallo for producing and reimagining the charcoal in his , also moving.

Indirizzo

Borca Di Cadore
32040

Sito Web

https://prometheusofl.com/

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