A Bathtub with a view, Museum from the Future, Sofia, Bulgaria
Une baignoire avec vue, Le musée du future, Sofia, Bulgarie
Designed and built by Ekaterina Leondieva and Julien Clabecq
Project selected for the festival “Rivers of Sofia” on the 29-31st August 2025
Organized by the Collective, КОЛЕКТИВЪТ
MUSEUM FROM THE FUTURE
The Museum from the Future is an interconnected series of 6 interactive site-specific installations exposing the ways in which we think about water, resources, waste and nature. The structures are linked through a fictional story placed in a future world that has experienced an environmental collapse. Our descendants of the future have engaged in the archeological and anthropological study of the past through remains and artefacts they uncover in their environment. They have created a museum which can show to their contemporaries how humans of the past (ourselves) lived and thought. The exhibition unfolds within the festival site highlighting specific “archeological finds” or providing interactive and educational installations. Each installation builds up the story and reveals the contradictions and peculiarities of our way of life in a witty and playful manner.
A bathtub with a view
A Bathtub with a View creates the atmosphere of a living room of bathroom relics: a cut bathtub turned into an armchair, a mounted showerhead lamp, and a flexible “showerhead phone”. Built from found objects, the structure directly faces the old sewage across the river. When seated, visitors can observe the red-lit sewage pipe discharging into the river. Picking up the showerhead, they hear a recorded audio documentary describing the function and role of pipes in past civilisation. The speaker is hidden inside the showerhead and the documentary is narrated by a deep male voice.
To the visitors
Relax in the armchair, made from a rare fragment of an antique bathtub. Pick up the shower-phone to learn about the hidden network that made the past human civilization possible, but also led to its demise.
The language of the pipe
Visually and conceptually all of the 6 installations are linked through the pipe as a main structural and symbolic element. A flexible red pipeline runs through the festival site and guides the Museum visitors, emerging in places that lead to installations. All pipes will be painted red in order to visually connect the installations.
The pipe and accessories connected to it relate to the displacement and control of water. They are symbols of modernity, progress and comfort and also a way to transport energy.
Pipes are witnesses of our industrial era. The pipe is embodying the contradiction of the world we live in: between modernity, comfort, progress and exploitation, pollution, destruction. This is why we chose the concept of pipes as a vehicle to tell the story of our world and throughout the installations we utilize the pipes as an observation device.
Scavenging and upcyling
Sustainability is the core theme of our installations, therefore all installations are constructed from found upcycled parts and elements. This creates a rough makeshift aesthetic that match the story of a fictional dystopian world in which humans are likely to scavenge old materials and use them to construct things.
Check out the other installations
