Talk and lunch

Join us for lunch! To attend this event, please make a reservation.

The Tidal Garden is inviting you to a lunch that delves into how we might nourish ourselves of salinised environments. The menu integrates halophytes - plants that grow on salty, tidal soil - to explore the ecological and cultural potential of Elbe’s future agricultural landscapes. As the salinisation of croplands increases with higher sea levels, cultivating salt-tolerant plants shifts the narrative from resisting to embracing the tides. This approach challenges the fertile-infertile dualism that has governed modern industrial agriculture, grounding adaptation in intergenerational repair. Staging a deep history of amphibious soils in the Elbe’s estuary, Salten Dykes offers a way to assimilate - chemically and culturally - the life-worlds halophytes carry, recuperating those that were, those that exist, and those we need to bring into being.    

The Tidal Garden is a Venice-based research agency founded in 2020 that explores the edible potential of halophytes - salt-tolerant plants - as a tool for cultural adaptation to climate change. Led by Filippo Grassi (environmental scientist), Lodovica Guarnieri (designer/researcher) and Lorenzo Barbasetti di Prun (chef/artist), in collaboration with a network of farmers and gastronomic professionals, the project focuses on establishing the cultivation of new crops and developing novel culinary habits from salinised agricultural fields.

Join us for lunch! To attend this event, please make a reservation.

Lodovica Guarnieri is the curator of cultural programming at The Tidal Garden. Venetian researcher, designer and curator, her work draws upon the entanglements between ecology and modern infrastructures. Her practice grapples with technoscience as it relates to extractivism, chemical exposure, colonialism, and their toxic afterlives in water ecologies. With a background in critical spatial practices and social design, Lodovica has gained eight years experience in curating performances, publications, pedagogical projects, public programmes and networks. These initiatives actively engage with local communities to uncover new material imaginaries for social and ecological justice.  

Lorenzo Barbasetti di Prun is head of gastronomic r&d at The Tidal Garden. He is a Lagoon-based chef with a background in eco-social design and the initiator of Prometheus_open food lab, an initiative that works at the intersection of art, design, science and food production as means for exploring remote landscapes, restoring human ecological responsibility and fostering communities’ resilience. Testing his practice in different social and cultural environments, he developed good abilities in building tight, multidisciplinary, international networks. He works with Dolomiti Contemporanee, one of the most effective regenerative programmes in Italy.

KITCHEN, Hall for Contemporary Art

English

This project takes place in collaboration with the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails project. At the intersection of art, culture, social integration, science, and technology, it extends the so-called European Green Deal of 2019 to coastal areas.
The Bauhaus of the Seas Sails project calls for fostering collective and caring relationships between human and more than human actors to create sustainable, inclusive, and hopeful future perspectives. As a pilot city, Hamburg focuses on a regenerative menu created by selected fellows, exploring the impacts of extensive human interventions in nature and associated ecological changes on the Hanseatic foodscape. It uses speculative gastronomy as a tool to reimagine its future.