Prometheus- Open Food Lab is a project whose aim is to generate, recover and redistribute knowledge relating to food.
The eventulal goal is to support resilience in remote areas, starting from the secluded spaces of our mind.
Food isn’t just nourishment, a mere survival too. What interests us is, first and foremost, its function of social catalyst and cultural “supplement”. It is able to change the perpective with which we look at the world, it is capable of flipping over the frameworks of meaning that relegate places to remoteness. Remoteness as a mental state. We will explore these locations of the mind and culture as if they were another planet entirely. We’re transdimentional explorers in this space that is both virginal and yet already violated in the most intimate meaning of the word. We look for intelligent life forms that may be able to generate intelligent forms of life.
Intermittent memories of ancient civilizations tell us that there was life here, before ski resorts and tourism of intermittent people with no memory at all. The space was emptied by the heap of clichés which drags itself along the plains below its own tedious bulk, then crumbles and flattens like an avalanche. It presents itself naked, and ready to be filled, once more, in this vacation. There, where rock, lighter, soars towards the sky.
The question is, rather: are we ourselves ready or could be still be, when the only sensible thing to do will be to give a meaning, once more, to these remote places, which are actually close to us, because they are only remote in our mind? Will we still have ourselves meaning at that point, or will we be able to only rely on our senses? Too late, then, to be explorers?
Explorers, revolutionaries and spirits of times long gone refuse the plains and sense the weight of those places where gravity loses its intensity without making the steps of people wishing to climb on them lighter.
We will make these locations our base of operations, a launch pad of future, and plenty in number, explorations, thanks to Dolomiti Contemporanee, which has agreed to lend us the structures of Progettoborca to undertake our training.

Lorenzo Barbasetti di Prun, January 2018

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Expedition #1, February 3rd – 6th 2018

The first team of explorers includes:

Lorenzo Barbasetti di Prun, creator of the project.

Angelica Stimpfl, presswoman and engraver with great cognizance of food. She tells stories that seem to come from a different time, and cooks fatty dishes of the Trentino Region tradition, with a little something added to them.
She builds tree houses and plans to repopulate her birth village in the Non Valley.

Giulia Fassina
Brilliant photographer and videomaker. Friend and travel companion, I could not think of a better person to document this endeavour. Not least of all because she probably would have held a grudge if I hadn’t asked her. Very picky and wary in the dietary field: it will be a lot of fun to have her taste whatever we’re going to concoct.

Matteo Ghigino
Young chef from Sardinia (more specifically Carloforte) with a great talent. He has taught me the majority of what I know, and most of all to eat leaves. Colleague and companion in adventures tethering on the edge of food poisoning. He has a blog about wild and forgotten foods. We work together on the AmiDO project, which gathers chef and producers of local delicacies..