Wrong Café (Väärä Kahvila) is a participatory art project that explores collective storytelling and dreams as an alternative currency. In the summer of 2025, for five days, an odd pop-up café was operated by the artist (dressed as a waiter) in the rooftop of an abandoned mall building named Väärätalo in Imatra, Finland. The café served coffee, pastries, and questions. In return, visitors were invited to "pay" by adding to an evolving myth rooted in Väärätalo inspired by their own dreams, which they drew on a piece of pink paper. Each tale was recorded as an audio file and passed to the next guest, transforming along the way like a game of telephone. Together, these fragments -- drawings and audio recordings -- wove into a strange urban folklore that blurs fact and fiction.
Wrong Cafe was part of the Aalto University Department of Media's collaboration with the City of Imatra. The Cafe was funded by 'I love Kipsari' Grant 2025. The performance part of the piece is completed after taking in 30 visitors, and the artist is currently working on transcribing the audio recordings and weaving them into a loosely connected narrative. The resulting recordings include stories in the following languages: Finnish, English, Spanish, and Korean, as the visitors were invited to speak in whichever language they feel comfortable in.
Each vistor were asked to pay for their coffee, tea, and/or cake by drawing a scene from a dream they had in the past. Afterwards, they were asked to listen to the previous person's recording (story) and continue the story by using their own dream as an inspiration point.
Here are some examples of the visitors' drawings:
