Those of you who have followed ‘Lost in a Cup’ from the early days in 2013, when it was a blog of an exchange student fascinated by the weird and beautiful Sweden – you have seen a lot of changes taking place on this platform.
2016: When I returned to Sweden to start my Master’s in Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University, I decided to re-activate it.
2017 I started using Lost in a Cup to sell espresso coffee roasted in my hometown in Sardinia and combine it with an idea of renewing the way we experience cafes.
In early 2020 me and a couple of friends fine tuned the concept to study a format for events in cafes that had the goal to bring more customers to the venues we collaborated with and at the same time stimulate interesting conversations amongst participants, inspired by academic research. We called these events ‘cultural café’, recalling the European coffee-drinking tradition established in the 1600’s.
The plan was to hold physical events in cafés in Uppsala and Stockholm but come March, covid-19 brought us to using Zoom. The experience was both challenging and rewarding as we managed to connect people around a virtual coffee table even from different parts of the world.
In all these years, the one red-line that connects Lost in a Cup’s activity is the mission behind all the work I did: to communicate effectively to a broad and diverse audience whilst stimulating thought-provoking and conversation-starting content.
2021: This year I achieved my childhood dream, to work as a journalist. In January I joined Sveriges Radio in Stockholm to work P3 Dokumentär, a very popular radio-documentary programme. I was there at Swedish public service radio for little over 6 months. In summer, I started working as a freelancer reporting from Oslo and Utøya for BBC World Service radio and Radio1 Rai, Italian public service.
Creating content for Lost in a Cup was put ‘på is’ (on ice), as we would say in Sweden but work continued, behind the scenes.
A new idea was developed – 3UPP Media. The mission is ‘to bridge the gap between academic research and society, by helping researchers and media producers connect.’ This idea was accepted on the incubator programme at Uppsala Innovation Centre and thanks to their support was further developed.
September 2021: This month I moved out of Uppsala, after living there for 5 years and started studying a masters’ in ‘investigative journalism’ at Gothenburg University. Having been to visit Gothenburg many times, I fell in love with the city after the first visit so am extremely happy to be here and hope to be able to somewhat develop Lost in a Cup further in future.
How? In what way? Those are two very good questions. Only time will tell!