Dimitra Sotirchos is a trendwatcher specializing in fashion, arts & culture. With an MA in Innovation for Trend forecasting, she is currently developing a visual arts practice studying Environmental Art at The Glasgow School of Art. She has contributed to AnOther magazine and Dazed Digital and is also involved with the electronic dance music In London and loves yoga, currently training in Ariel yoga.

 

 

Beforelight is a Greek-based collective experimenting artistically with light. Staging urban interventions with innovative lighting design, their experiential projects provoke community interaction in public spaces, encouraging human encounters with artificial light.

 

Opportunities for artists to make work in and for other contexts and places are increasing. Through my interest in environmental art I contacted the group to find out more about their practice.

 

How do you feel light affects the community?

Light is very important in order to create atmosphere, mood and make a space inviting or hostile. In urban spaces, it is usually hard to change public lighting, thus you feel unable to have any saying in the way our cities are lit.However, we must not forget that public space lighting is a very recent commodity and there is a long way to go in developing it further, either in terms of technology or of artistic expression. We feel light is a very important factor on how we perceive space and it is also a « playful » element that should be more accessible to citizens.

What project have you created that you believe most reflects a hybrid between organic and digital materials?

« I see no sea » is the most hybrid, we believe. The visitor finds a wooden jetty inside an exhibition room. A wooden structure stands elevated over a thin layer of salt, tinted bleu by fluorescent lights. The installation is escorted by the multiplied sound of the visitors’ footsteps. The organic materials of wood, and salt create the platform for an outlandish environment, enhanced by the digitally reproduced and processed sound of footsteps.

 

 

Their latest project is installation ‘Under a different light’. The inventive public art happening is a collaborative initiative between Beforelight and Imagine the City, a cluster for regeneration. Local community members were invited to participate in the creation of the work, donating quirky lighting fixtures that were restored and hung in a small street in the city of Thessaloniki. The space is redefined with celebratory spirit creating a warm and homely place to explore.

 

Dimitra Sotirchos

 

 

www.beforelight.gr

 

dimitra ‘s blog 

Camilla Bo’ is an Italian freelance journalist and stylist. After two years of study in Paris she returned to her native Rome to study architecture. The art of critique proved more fruitful for Camilla and she began to write for the Association of Art and Critic about art and design and on her personal blog Choufouchouf. Focusing on the relation and communication between fashion and art, she decided to follow her creative nature not only giving a voice to the library she has on her laptop but also as inspiration for editorials. She’s now based in London, attending the course of «Art Direction for Fashion» at the Central Saint Martins College of Art.

 

It’s a cold morning in London and Amira is here after a long long trip in China, Mongolia, Hungary, Germany and France. She has a silver suitcase with her, full of precious photographs from the trip.

 

When she gave me her heavy book and I started to look at her work I could feel her alert gaze upon me. She is so graceful, attentive and absent at the same time. I can recognize her in her pictures, so simple and powerful.

 

Nature is always present in her projects. So it’s natural to think that it’s where she likes to be the most.

She explains that is the primitive side of nature which fascinate her and it is actually what she captures in her pictures, but then she prefers to live in big cities.

 

Every time you see Amira’s pictures, you can find something different. You can hang them on the wall and I’m sure you’ll never be tired to look at them. There is a special harmony between colours, subjects and composition that makes you feel peaceful.

 

 

You’re one of the few that still snaps in analog format. It ‘s easy to see why.  Do you have any secrets to create a special atmosphere on the photos in the darkroom? Do you use particular types of paper or materials during the printing phase?

I think my biggest secret is to spend a lot of time with my pictures in the darkroom and to be open to experimentation. I sometimes play with the chemicals, use pre-flashed paper and move the paper while I am exposing the film, but these are all effects that could be done easily with photoshop. What makes my work improve is the time I put into it – you have to imagine, a colour darkroom is a total black space. There is no distraction possible. There are no calls, as the phone would lighten the paper, no computer, no internet, no one opening the door. You are totally alone and there is only darkness surrounding you. To put myself in this kind of restrictive situation somehow rubs off on the images and transforms them into objects. For me, it’s like giving them a soul.

Your works are closer to paintings than to photographs. I mean there seems to be an influence of film sources or pictorial sources. Did you do any work in the past that has characterized so much your language?

While I studied in Vienna and part of my time in Berlin I worked as a movie projectionist. Always in little independent cinemas. So I have spent thousands of hours staring through a little window watching parts of movies. For sure, that influenced my work.

 

I ‘ve always been fascinated by your pictures with flowers covering faces… It reminds me to a vase. The men is the vase, the container of something alive. Why do you love cover people faces with the flower compositions?It is a choice dictated by aesthetic criteria or does it mean anything to you in particular?

I like to express feelings through my work. To make them visible for the viewer, I suppose a transformation into the surreal is sometimes necessary for this to happen. The idea to cover people’s faces came from making portraits of my family. I have been familiar with these faces my whole life, so I responded to them in a different way than a stranger would. I put the flowers there to translate my perception into a visual format – to show the faces how I see them.

 

 

The flowers chosen for your set-up are often out of context, even if you’re shooting in the woods or in a field you have the idea of a real set. And perhaps there lies the strength of your images. It ‘s always like that or there were some natural places you do not want them to change?

I am still looking for that place which looks exactly how it feels. I guess I would never leave if I found it.

 

Which artist you would like to collaborate with in the future?

Werner Herzog

 

Which are your next projects?

I recently traveled from Shanghai to Paris purely using transportation on land. Siberia was part of the trip, the landscape is just crazy there. It’s so cold for most of the year and then in the short summer, people, animals and plants are blossoming in such an intense way. I think, I have to go back there.

 

Camilla Bo’

 

amirafritz.com

 

Camilla Bo’ s website

Lidewij Edelkoort delves into the world of contemporary fetishism to reveal a daring and instinctive future for style and culture. Fetishism in Fashion investigates topics including the evolution of taste from birth to adulthood, the elevation of shoes through ever-higher heels, the psychology of branding, the effects of infantilism, the power of black, the fetishizing of objects, and our interaction with skin and the body.

 

Essays and interviews include contributions by Andrea Branzi, Sylvia Chivaratanond, Malu Halasa, Susan Piët, Henk Schiffmacher, Valerie Steele, Faye Toogood and Betony Vernon.

 

More than fifty fetishes are illustrated by inspiring visuals from Leigh Bowery, Roland Fischer, Pieter Hugo, Erwin Olaf, Jenny Saville, Sølve Sundsbø, Marie Taillefer, Ari Versluis & Ellie Uyttenbroek, Marcel van der Vlugt and Carsten Witte.

The boundaries of design are stretched in the work of Iris van Herpen, Bart Hess, Pepe Heykoop, Formafantasma and Alexander McQueen.

 

Bolder, crazier and more outlandish fashions are on the horizon, making this book a key reference in a new era of experimentation and intense creativity, unveiling the intimate ties that bind us.

 

Release date: mid-June, 2013 Order a copy now

 

RRP €39 (plus €6 postage & handling) Published by Frame, Amsterdam.

An amalgam of people on a trip to Africa 20 years ago decided to create a foundation and has since worked together for two decades to design, produce and sell azimuth collections from different backgrounds; Benin, India and Morocco are the eclectic countries chosen because of their cultural resources in terms of dyeing, weaving, braiding and recycling and moreover thanks to their grace, their optimism and their joy of living, painfully absent from our countries, remedy against the gloominess.

 

This year, Heartwear will present its anniversary collection during M°BA 13 at Judith ter Haar’s Arnhem famous boutique, Jones.The collection reflects the maturity of the Heartwear brand and its creators’ determination, a collection that quotes twenty years of designs and deep indigo textiles.

 

From minimal polka dots to extra-large banana leaves, from African sailors’ stripes to the batik flowers of the islands, form large tint areas to the black-spotted wax, all these patterns gather and mix together to become a living memory of savoir-faire. Like a cadavre exquis, you are invited to assemble, transform, and collect these proposals with excess.

To make you happy, make us happy and especially to help sustain another twenty years for Heartwear’s tribe of weavers, dyers, tailors, sewing shops, potters, woodsmiths and aluminium recyclers.

 

Long Live to handcraft!

 

Lidewij Edelkoort

 

Heartwear will be on sale at Jones in Arnhem from June 8 to July 21, 2013

 

A sale will also take place at Studio Edelkoort in Paris from June 1 to 9, 2013

 

Heartwear

 

www.jonesarnhem.com

 

Marie Taillefer 

Jules van den Langenberg recently graduated at Design Academy Eindhoven. His fascination for cultivating culture led to the establishment of a nomadic production house, a traveling studio in which Jules initiates and curates design processes. The young -Willy Wonka like- cult industrialist works on the development of two projects in the context of Dutch Design. Besides this he is developing his skills as designer of dialogues / cultural entrepreneur / design curator through freelance works in exhibition making, concept development and spin-doctoring. In October Jules’ nomadic production house will be present at Dutch Design Week 2013. During Salone del Mobile in Milan,  Jules shares with us some of his discoveries and « coup de coeur ».

 

Within an immense environment of a reconstructed 19th Century Railway Station at MOST, in the Museum of Science and Technology, Tom Dixon and Adidas presented a preview of their collaboration project during the Salone del Mobile. This reveal marks the beginning of a two-year partnership during which four new product collections of apparel, luggage and footwear will be launched, the first hitting global retailers in January 2014. The Milan Museum encapsulates the history of industrial travel and design, creating an appropriate and dynamic backdrop for the presentation of their project.

 

The capsule collection ‘everything-you-can-pack-neatly-in-a-bag-for-a-week-away’ provides the contemporary global citizen with a utilitarian yet aesthetically pleasing set of clothes that is based on flat packing,  expandability and multi-functionality. A workwear wardrobe full of grayish pastels combined with intense blues and yellows in which the skills of industrial designer Dixon and the qualities of sportswear company Adidas merged.

« Premiering new typologies of bags and apparel, the base of the collection comprises two travel bags typologies – the hard and the soft – an experiment in capsule thinking in which luggage unclasps, unzips and unfolds to reveal multiple layers. Inside, the bags reveal a complete kit of parts for our week long stay in Italy – neatly, crisply and compactly folded with maximum efficiency to provide a complete wardrobe for every possible occasion. » states Tom Dixon.

 

Noteworthy pieces from the collection are the Multi Purpose Suits, the Flat Pack Shoes and the Down Coat Sleeping Bag.

 

To be flat-packed in your travel bags, the light weight Flat Pack Shoes are made of a firm base to which a textile is attached that is flexible enough so it can be bend around your ankle. The ingenious construction of the shoe is presented in Milan by showcasing the few elements that need to be assembled to construct the footwear. Worn as a comfortable second skin, the ‘Down Coat Sleeping Bag’ enables its user to stay the night spontaneously. The coat’s double function lining can be unfolded- and transformed into a sleeping bag.

 

Both enabling a nomadic lifestyle.

 

 

adidas.com

www.tomdixon.net

www.mrtuft.tumblr.com

www.cultivatingculture.nl