I got to know Daniela during our time together in Landau and I was excited to hear about her project. A successful painter, Daniela gave up the “mechanism of saleable artwork often placed in inaccessible locations”* to make as many Nutcrackers as possible, the ultimate aim is a Nutcracker for every inhabitant of the world – the project’s official name is 6,829,360,438.
Her focus is not so much in the object itself – although the root is of course in the story by E.T.A. Hoffmann – rather in the act of giving, in the performance of creating and donating an object to random strangers. When asked the rather uninteresting question of “so why are you doing this? how do you earn a living?”, she promptly explains that this is not the point, much to the contrary the project is about doing something for nothing, something we all find very hard to grasp. If you define her process of making the Nutcrackers a waste of time, you are one step closer to understanding: Daniela wants to give value to wasted time and start changing our attitude towards one another (and towards the concept of gratuity and donating) by coming into our lives with a cumbersome, unpractical object.

The giving of the Nutcrackers can be seen as an invasion of someone else’s space but it is precisely because of this that the concept works so well.
Delivering them, now, that is another story.

I accompanied Daniela with another friend of hers on a tour of the city of Landau with the aim of delivering one Nutcracker at a time. The first attempt had been successful and a mother of two accepted the gift saying that one of her sons was just going to celebrate his birthday. Upon seeing the size of the object, someone had even called the husband, who reluctantly avoided any negative response and waited for us to depart.
The following attempts however were mostly source of increasing frustration. Whereas Daniela seemed accustomed to the negative and suspicious reactions, I thought that the mention of “art project” and “conference organized by the city of Landau” (we were creative here) would have sealed the deal. I was wrong. Inhabitants of buildings with security cameras spied on us while we were trying to convince the only person who even bothered to respond. When we were not greeted with plain contempt (“stop telling stories”), it was mostly suspicion that held people back. In the end, we had not managed to donate any more Nutcrackers and had to go back to the gallery.
What I found through this experience was that the problem was not so much our inability to convince the targets of the action, rather the fact that we basically were not listened to at all. We normally started by ringing a random door bell at the main entrance and when someone answered, we would briefly explain who we were, who the artist was and what she wanted to do. The moment the word “gift” was uttered, people would shut down. However, I am not even so sure that we managed to keep anyone’s attention that far into the sentence. By the fifth attempt I thought we had a pretty well practiced speech and I was starting to feel embarrassed that I could not help out, since Daniela was relying on us to translate her words into German. In the end we discussed the speech in terms of strategy (such as trying to figure out by the last name who was potentially Italian so that we could rely on cultural common ground), which brought out the complexity of the issue that the artist is tackling: you need to get all strategic even when genuinely all you want to do is deliver a gift.

*citing the leaflet given out by the artist

Killing Us Softly 4 Trailer from Media Education Foundation on Vimeo.

In her documentary, Killing Us Softly 4, Jean Kilbourne says, referring to the ideal of absolutely flawless beauty with which we are continually fed by ads:

“She never has any lines or wrinkles, she certainly does not have any scars or blemishes, indeed, she has no pores”.

This series could easily be called “find the same“, if you know what I mean.

Is going to museums a purely educational activity? Purely recreational? Is it about a very subtle form of social interaction, doing what is expected of us? How is this connected with our identity, the way we identify ourselves in terms of class, culture and gender?
There is enough material to write an essay, or a book, and plenty of articles have been written on this subject.
Many studies that delve into subject are deeply connected to marketing, that is, visitors’ reasons for visiting a museum are then used to adjust the way the visits are structured to make the experience more pleasant for “customers”.

For now, in the hope of making this topic into a series, I will leave you with some photographs from two museums I visited which I think offered a rather interactive experience to visitors, though in different degrees: the Sugar museum and the Computer Games museum. In the former, visitors could watch a demonstration of the making of ice (“the ancient Rome way”), while the latter is an interactive museum per se, where visitors can not only play a bit of the games, but get to listen and watch videos related to the different aspects of gaming.

Among the places at the forefront in the crafting community, the one-year-old “La Bastellerie” is well worth a visit.
This crafting lounge in Berlin Kreuzberg is a three-room crafting paradise, offering various workshops – from bookbinding, to embroidery, to restyling old clothing -, hosting the newly opened exhibition “The Wunderkabinett” [Closet of wonders], and a small open studio where, for five euros per hour, you can use a sewing machine and various other tools.
While making pin buttons and drinking tea, Ina Göllmann recounted the beginnings of the crafting lounge. “We started a couple of years ago with crafting parties, an idea that I got while researching on the web. I read about craft events in the Unites States and in London and thought it was a great idea. I wondered why there were no such events in Berlin”.
The parties proved successful, so they decided to take the project one step further and opened La Bastellerie, at first an open workspace only. Activism and community-building are also at the heart of La Bastellerie’s mission. “We observed that people who had never even met before, all of the sudden created something together and sort of got to know each other in a different way. This is a good basis to make ideas circulate and motivate people to do stuff together”.

La Bastellerie

Independent craft and DIY are slowly taking root in Germany, and whereas this is the city where this sort of movements are more likely to emerge, the explanation seems to rest in the historical and cultural tradition of German artisanry. “Germany is the only country where, in order to found a business as a carpenter, you need to have a Master craftsman’s diploma [in German Meisterbrief].
So, the focus has not been on DIY, and even the word “basteln” [the German equivalent of “to tinker”] is not really highly thought of. It mainly refers to activities for children or “aunties” and it is relegated to the hobby area”, said Ina. La Bastellerie wants to help change the perception of craft, which is also why they chose to keep the word “basteln” in the name, “in order to give it a good connotation, to send the message that this is something that adults do as well, also as a hobby, of course, but not only”.

La Bastellerie is also home to the Wunderkabinett, an ever changing exhibition of very unique handmade products. It was founded by Leah Buckareff, a Canadian bookbinder and musician currently living in Berlin – and co-founder of the Torontian City of Craft -, who had dreamt about creating the Wunderkabinett for some time, and wanted to keep herself engaged in the craft scene.
When comparing the local crafting community to its Canadian counterpart, Leah Buckareff also sees the smaller importance of consumer culture in Germany as a factor: “North America’s long history of consumer culture encouraged a lot of us to start making our own stuff and altering our own clothes to make it unique at a very young age. A lot of today’s craft scene is born out of that DIY culture. Consumption wasn’t as big a part of German life so today’s craft scene also feels like they’ve taken or mimicked the already developed craft world (via Etsy) and applied it to the community here”.

The interest in crafting among young adults is undoubtedly growing and the many craft fairs and designer markets offer a great showcase. More and more groups are forming, such as the Stricken Bar, a collective created by some of the members of the “Collectif France Tricot”, who regularly organize very successful knitting events in downtown Berlin’s bars. With places such as La Bastellerie and groups that showcase crafters’ work and bring the know-hows to the masses, crafting is well on its way to becoming an important aspect of this vibrant city’s cultural and artistic reality.

In continuous evolution…
From the series: Visions of humans

After ruling out London as a potential dream place to live (though it’s still a great source for interesting shots), I am happily home, soon looking for a new apartment and trying to figure out my next move.

I have several ideas, a new project that is (too) slowly coming together, in which I will be cooperating with a great artist and very dear friend of mine, another project that is supposed to be in its final stages but somehow it’s not (?).
To make the story short, after “Structurally recyclable, basically disposable” I wanted some breathing time, however absurd that might sound.
Ideas come to me in the strangest moments of the day, and I am very excited about this new cooperative work I will be doing, of which I shall tell you nothing just yet.

If you want, however, here is my take on London.

When I look at a beautiful photograph of a mountain I think that what I am looking at is inserted into a much broader environment. A city or a village must not be too far away from the mountain, there surely is someone skiing on its paths, climbing its walls. Is there a tunnel, a road, a passage nearby?

I’ve been looking at some of my photographs from the past and I have realized that I am moved by – literally, in that I function and work through – this contradiction. Although presence has been a topic in the past, I began exploring this more openly only very recently.

The photos from Geneva are still in their undeveloped film form and the films are still in my bag. I intend to bring them to the lab today, if my current dizziness allows it.
Besides, here are some photographs of Naples, from June, when I went back there to get back my exhibition.

(You have to click on one photo at a time. There is no gallery)