Mapping Flavours and Places

What does a place taste like, and what happens when that place begins to change? In this collaborative cooking workshop with Genomic Gastronomy, we will explore connections between food, biodiversity, culture and place.

Using ingredients from Ljubljana and its surroundings, we will discover how landscapes, plants, microorganisms, animals and human food cultures come together on a plate. We will also explore how these relationships change in a warming world.

Through guided tastings, culinary experiments, discussion and live creative programming, or “vibe coding”, we will assemble and rework combinations of ingredients together. Drawing on fifteen years of the collective’s projects and methods, we will develop dish prototypes such as A New National Dish for Slovenia, Travelling Terroir and LOCI: Bioregionalism in One Bite.

The programme is part of Rog Design Days, held this year under the theme More Than Us. Through food, we will consider the other living beings, landscapes and forms of labour that make our meals possible. Whose lives and environments do we touch when we describe something as “local”?

Together, we will taste unusual and unexpected dishes and discover new ways of understanding landscapes through food.

This is an internal workshop for invited participants.

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About Genomic Gastronomy

The workshop will be led by Genomic Gastronomy, an artist-led research collective founded in 2010 by Cathrine Kramer and Zack Denfeld, joined by Emma Conley in 2013. They explore biotechnology, biodiversity and food systems, developing prototypes of alternative culinary futures.

They collaborate with scientists, cooks, hackers and farmers, sharing their research through publications, shared meals, workshops and exhibitions. Their work has appeared in Science, Nature and Gastronomica and has been presented internationally at venues including Kew Gardens, the V&A, Science Gallery and MIT Museum. They work between Amsterdam and Porto.