ANDREA SEBASTIANELLI

Product and Graphic Designer




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Eatable flowers

2016









Co-developed with: Ferruccio Valentini
Photo credits: Stefania Zanetti
Unibz

From April till September on the Alps a large quantity of balsamic flowers, officinal herbs and medical plants are growing. In the whole human history foraging played a fundamental role for medicinal and food purposes. Nowadays only few people is preserving the knowhow and practicing it day by day. Through a collection of candies I collaborated with one of this people and designed a “taste of a place”.

In the Italian region of Trentino, in a small valley called Val di Non, I met Ferruccio Valentini one if the few people left handing down the ancient practice of foraging. He knows everything about his surrounding environment, names and properties of herbs, how they might be used and when is the right time to harvest them.
I got inspired by visiting his house noticing his collection of fossils. Indeed fossils tell a story of a place, as photography does, but what if we could experience a tase of a place?
By using medical herbs and spontaneous plants, Sapore Fossile wants to capture their perfume and flavour in a series of candies, experimenting what the taste of a place would be like.The first production gave me the opportunity to test different combination of taste and possible outputs. Through workshop this experience can be replicated to trigger communities re-start harvesting and processing spontaneous plant. An utopia scenario would be realizing a cooperative to produce local production of candies, using herbs of the surrounding and obtaining seasonal collection.