Prometheus_lab, Borca di Cadore (2026)

23/09/2026

ils sont arrivés

prometheus_en Provence, hosted at Domaine Saint Joseph – Atelier François Aubrun for a month long research residency in partnership with Gianluca D'incà Levis exploring Provence region, the 25 hectares of the domain, caves, a single iconic mountain, its painter's bulky heritage, plants and parasites, and other ingenious beings carving their landscape.

And it is only the first day.

Adieu, au revoir

22/08/2026

IGP_index for a Gastronomy of Potential gets to its 5th edition.

This year marks the 60th edition of Dipartimento Territorio e Sistemi agro-forestali - UNIPD 's Course of Culture in Ecology that with Gianluca D'incà Levis supports our programme since 2022.

This milestone, coming in such a challenging time, also urges us to question the boundaries of specialisation, connecting disciplines and far away ecologies more than ever. Climate change poses an existential threat to species globally jeopardising the fabric of biodiversity and the resilience of landscapes as we know it.
Yet in the fast shifting mosaic of climates the complexity and multiplicity of life forms make a largely neglected dictionary of adaptation. Scoping organisms and their interaction across environments, managing or even designing their migration allows for new worlds to emerge and old ones to revive and adapt. Ultimately an ecology freed of the invisible borders drawn by humans to segregate one another, spheres of competences, environments, to give citizenship to organisms, could allow the emergence of unexpected, shared solutions. Worlds beyond the limits of the current understanding.
Humans have already terraformed one alien planet, their own. Only through that generative attitude, that accounts for countless cultures they can try to understand and design their way out of here.

With LudovicaMenardi and aly sparkling beveridge and Marco Del Favero we will explore multiple environments, from salt marshes in the Venetian Lagoon to mountain forests and peaks in the Dolomites looking for different ecologies, how they are interconnected and how people interact with them carving their cultural and economical niche through history. How they understand and welcome changes, cope with things they can't leave out or they have invited in.

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.

11/09/2024

RUPE> resource-heritage-edible

regeneration and transformation
Resource, in biology, indicates the availability of energy that can be assimilated by organisms in a given environment. Yet a resource is such only if there is a system of cultural (and biological) tools capable of understanding it and giving it value. To then ferry it from a state of potential to an application perspective. Food is one manifestation of this projection of culture onto the edible material. The codified resource becomes a tool for transforming the landscape until it is recognized as a heritage. Cultural, identity, economic. What happens when the resource, which has become heritage, is reproduced identical to itself in a system of values and tools that has become dissonant?

With RUPE, Prometheus_ investigates the potential of the edible resource inside and outside the strictly local reference system. It unleashes the resource/liver from the constraints of stereotypical and symbolic reiteration, to promote new paradigms of resource management and continuous heritage formation.

RUPE brings resources to the table, local and foreign. Edibles that are in the environment, untouched source of energy that have the potential to become heritage; others that can be introduced to power new ideas and new paradigms of management. Heritage lost, heritage chained and fixed to the bluff, unable to adapt and respond to the changings, unable to promote any changing of perspective, forced to regenerate identical to itself like the liver of Prometheus. Heritage frustrated.

RUPE is the prelude to RIPARIPA, a convention on regeneration and heritage curated by

graphic design: .si.ta

27/08/2024

Index for a Gastronomy of Potential (IGP) gets to its third edition.

This year, the residency for cooks promoted by
in partnership with .unipd and will explore wetlands.

Broad term, container that includes an extremely wide variety of complex environments, in mountain as at zero altitude (or below), wetlands around the world shared histories inextricably intertwining with human ones. In fact, perhaps more than any other environment, these signal the temperature of the development of the human thought on the landscape and therefore of the relationship between human activities and the natural environment. More than anything else they were agents of the development of civilizations, all of them, but also the first front of conflict between culture and the elements. Water and earth constitutes the mutable field of ancient and complex relationships shaped by the need to harness the elemental forces and organize them, according to the structures of thought, the availability of techniques and the projection of oneself, or rather of an idea of the world and development. Mixtures with variable humidity, inscrutable amphibious volumes and layers, cradles of life and civilisation, of diseases and destruction; places of reclamation, to be healed and made productive, fertile; landfill and infrastructure for the transportation and production of energy. Dens of the magical, the holy and the terror; forces that are ungovernable and must be governed at the same time. The water of life and the water of death, iridescent matter with multiple stages, never still, never tamed. Elusive, like the many mythological figures that inhabit it and give it tangible shape in human imaginations. Violante, uncontrollable, treacherous, unpredictable. Yet indispensable.

The topic selected for the 58th Course of Culture in Ecology is particularly dear to us. Following multiple lines and stages of waters we will connect our work in the Dolomites with the programme launched by in 2020 in the Venetian Lagoon under the name of

16/05/2024

EXPRIMO III with .tallo

La musica, e il suono. Anzi, il suono è un ingrediente dell'esperienza. Elemento del mondo sensibile di cui siamo partecipi. La musica una struttura organizzativa di quei suoni, secondo canoni specifici che guidano l'esperienza estetica. Oppure in ostilità a questi canoni, se rigidi, inaugura territori inesplorati, collide col gusto che è abitudine (e un po' di fisiologia, ma non è una scusa).
La musica è anche ingrediente dell'esperienza gastronomica. Non della messa in scena che ora chiamiamo esperienza (o experience) ma di quel concertato insieme di stimoli che mirano ai sensi, tutti.
Tallo raccoglie gli ingredienti della sua musica con un maniacale lavoro di campionatura non diverso, nel metodo e negli esiti, da quello della cucina di .ristorante e . Stridono, urtano, picchiano fino a che non entrano in un sistema autonomo di coerenza. E son lì perché ha senso che ci siano, perché il senso lo costruiscono líddove ancora non c'è. Formano paesaggi che ancora non esistono. Tallo quindi ci serve tre portate, un buffet opportunamente costruito da quegli strumenti di indagine e compositivi che son della musica e della cucina. Tre live sets, tre pietanze per ogni set. Una degustazione in tre atti.
Domenica 19, alle 17.

Prometheus_lab

23/09/2026

22/08/2026

25/08/2025

04/08/2025

08/04/2025

29/11/2024

03/11/2024

11/09/2024

27/08/2024

16/05/2024

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