 |
|
| > |
 |
| NOMAD Interview Amsterdam >> scroll down | | home | |
| Interview with Stijn Roodnat, designer, Rotterdam Design Prize 2007's award winner, co-founder of KapteinRoodnat | ||
Marleen Kaptein and
Stijn Roodnat are a design unit based in Amsterdam who have produced
award winning design project and architectural design internationally,
and are committed to socially responsible design concepts. |
||
 |
||
| The award winning project for elementary school 'De Paradijsvogel", Ypenburg. For the details about this project, check here. | ||
 |
||
| Project for elementary school 'De Paradijsvogel", Ypenburg. |
| Image-interview with Melle Hammer, Amsterdam-based graphic designer (December 2007, Amsterdam) | ||
 |
||
| Melle Hammer | ||
| Image-interview
with Melle Hammer, graphic designer, photographs and idea by Melle Hammer,
photographs and production by Connie Dekker (NOMAD Amsterdam correspondent, www.conniedekker.nl). Melle Hammer is an Amsterdam-based graphic designer, but that is not all, he writes a book, he works on artist books, the project 'osohalfwayhome' for the stylist Osobene and he made a film which was used as a stage set by the musician Jaap Blonk, he is the initiator of Design Inquiry, he invented the 'vouwkoffer': a prize winner design for a folding portfolio, and he works on many other projects. (more...) |
||
| Interview with Renny Ramakers, design historian and co-founder of the Droog Design (June 2007, at Droog's office, Amsterdam) | ||
| Interview with Renny Ramakers, design historian and co-founder of the Droog Design based in Amsterdam. The Design collective incorporates the work of an international cadre of contemporary designers working with low-cost industrial or recycled materials. In Dutch, droog means "dry" (as in "dry wit"), and unadorned or simple. The Droog Design collection is now a broad assembly of international designs that are plain and practical, including more than 150 diverse objects. www.droogdesign.nl Use a slow connection? Try this. | ||
| Interview with Marieke van Diemen by Connie Dekker (February 2007, at the M4 Guest Studio of Tetterode, Amsterdam) |
 |
|
| At Marieke's studio |
| Marieke
van Diemen is an Amsterdam-based artist who studied at St. Joost in
Breda and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. At the moment she has an
exhibition at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam where
she is presenting a site-specific installation in which she displays
her mega collection of “West Germany” vases. The exhibition started on the January 20 and is open until October 28. The setting for the interview is the apartment of the interviewer, the artist Connie Dekker, located in the Dapperbuurt in Amsterdam; and the time is 4 pm on Thursday February 2, 2007. |
||
 |
||
| Marieke's collection of vases |
| Connie Dekker - How did you get involved with these vases? | ||
| Marieke van Diemen - Twelve
years ago I bought my first vase in a second-hand store in Amsterdam.
I love to go to these stores to observe the things they sell and to
study how they were made. After some time I noticed that the vases I
picked up had the inscription “West Germany” underneath.
Then I thought maybe I should buy them, weird and ugly as they are.
Although I hoped to retrieve secret meanings out of the vases, I never
succeeded in doing so. At the time I had no clue what to do with them;
of course I knew that I wanted to use them as a future item for my art work, but only during the years that followed did I start to develop more concrete ideas. I collected not only vases, but also other things that could be described as “carriers”, like small side tables, trays and candlesticks. Vases are fascinating not only literal carriers of flowers, but also in that they bear a great deal of information about the period of time when they were produced. On top of that, each of them has its own history in the sense that they have been a part of someone else’s interior. After a while I started to photograph the vases. In 2002 I presented a DVD of the vases in an exhibition at the artist space Outline (www.outlineamsterdam.nl). The DVD consists of a fast sequence of images of vases, with a harsh sound accompanying the appearance of each vase. Over the years, I began to see relations between the vases and on this basis I divided them in groups. I then wanted to enlarge these specific groups on the basis of colour and form, so I kept on buying more and more. I went to flea markets everywhere. As the origin of the vases is German, I bought a lot of them in Berlin during an artist-in-residence period. Sometimes I bought something like 60 vases a day. In my studio in Berlin I didn’t have closets or shelves, so they were spread around on the floor and I well remember that watching the vases day in, day out from above (all these holes!) created a sense of depression. Back in my studio in Amsterdam, I began to put them on shelves along the wall and only then became aware of their possibilities. With all these vases standing on shelves, something started to happen; they generated a sense of ‘presentation’, which was already an important aspect of my art work as well. |
 |
|
| Marieke's temporary studio in Amsterdam (The M4 Guest Studio of Tetterode) |
| How did you get organized? | ||
| First
of all, I needed a big studio to bring all the vases together, I had
them stored in different places in Amsterdam. I was offered a guest
studio (www.m4gastatelier.nl)
at Tetterode, so I packed up all 1550 vases and moved them in. Although
I knew approximately in which groups I wanted to organize the vases,
it nevertheless took me one and a half months to classify them more
precisely. The division of the groups is governed by their degree of
“difficulty” to classify. I invented nicknames for the groups,
such as the “pot-bellied ones”, “the difficult ones”,
“the ugly difficult ones”, “the beautiful difficult
ones”, and “the hip stuff”. As you will understand,
it was quite an effort. I also made classifications by the periods in
which the vases were produced. There is this very vague period, I presume
the 1980s, in which they really got lost and produced everything imaginable.
The 1970s were characterized by their very hip and colourful vases.
Oh yes, I also have vases from the 1950s and 1930s. Then I have other
classifications in the sense of “beer jugs”, “farmers’
flowers”, “the brown pack” (the series which shows
all the colour tones of diarrhoea) and so on. In my presentation for Boijmans I was looking for very simple presentation forms. Along the main wall I organized the vases, which I call, the “families”, a big series with more or less the same form but they vary in size and do have different glazing. The other vases were organized upon the group classifications I mentioned before and the different groups were placed in the cabinets I designed specifically for this situation. |
 |
|
| Installation view at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam (www.boijmans.nl) |
| And now back to Amsterdam. How is life in the city? |
| For many years, the places where
I like to hang out in the city centre have been the “de Pels”
and “de Engelbewaarder” pubs and the “de Kring”
art club (www.kring.nl).
However, the most impressive place to be, without question, is the new
concert hall (www.muziekgebouw.nl)
at the IJ bank, not far from Central Station. I love to go to the Bimhuis
(www.bimhuis.nl),
which is a podium for contemporary Jazz and improvisation, and its concert
hall at the Muziekgebouw has a wonderful atmosphere. I think that
after a period of depression, Amsterdam is developing cultural and architectural
projects in such a fast and amazing way that it makes the city vibrantly
alive and very worthwhile to live in. Of all the developments along
the IJ bank I might mention, including the new film museum, the Cultural
Embassy/Lloyd Hotel (www.lloydhotel.com), Post CS and the newly renovated
warehouse De Zwijger, the whole place is great and will soon be even
more so! Amsterdam is the most compact city ever. In London or Berlin you need hours to get somewhere. But here almost everything you need is no further than 5 or 10 minutes away by bike. Distances are very short. That is the thing I love most. (End) |
| | home | top | |
| Designed
by nomadpaper and 515 Creative shop ©Association NO MAD Martigny, CH 2011. All rights reserved. |
 |