© Capturing Creativity / Росина Пенчева© Capturing Creativity / Росина Пенчева© Capturing Creativity / Росина Пенчева© Capturing Creativity / Росина Пенчева© Capturing Creativity / Росина Пенчева© Capturing Creativity / Росина Пенчева
Recipes for the Future
2025
Collaboration with Elena Balabanska and Izabela Markova
Workshops & Survey
Recipes for the Future gathered the hopes, beliefs, and ideas of young people living and studying along the route of Sofia’s tram No. 10. Through workshops and a public survey, we engaged young people from different schools and socioeconomic groups along the tram’s route, which we use as a symbolic and literal line of connection between various neighborhoods and communities.
The tram’s route starts in the area around Paradise Center, whose fancy office buildings, IT companies, and corporate atmosphere symbolize the dominant cultural narrative that tech will rule the future. But with every subsequent stop, the tram leaves behind this “paradise” and journeys into a more colorful and many-layered Sofia.
The tram passes by universities, vocational schools, and foreign language high schools. At each stop, we add new ingredients to our recipe for the future, in which technological advancement is not the only flavor.
Aiming not just to collect individual perspectives but rather to create collective “recipes” for a shared future, we took their responses and shaped them into three recipes creatively seeking to address what we saw as the participants’ overarching “hungers” for the future.
The recipes, along with information about our process and participant responses, were published in a bilingual risograph-printed zine and shared at a public event as part of the urban art festival Nine Elephants. The event took the form of a picnic, where we debuted the zine and cooked and shared the recipes that we created. The picnic took place in West Park, near the last stop of the tram. A student from the Sofia High School of Bread and Pastry Technology, the final school along the tramline, baked the bread for the picnic.
“Recipes for the Future” is a project of Urban Storytelling School - an Erasmus+ program co-partnered between Center for Social Vision (Sofia) and C*Space (Berlin).