less is more...

...more difficult than it looks...

by Grant Snider

Back to the Roots...

Back to the Roots  founded by Alejandro Velez & Nikhil Arora during their last semester at UC Berkeley in 2009. 

MOVE-EAT-LEARN

= a trip of a lifetime
« 3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage… all to turn 3 ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning and food ….into 3 beautiful and hopefully compelling short films...  move, eat, learn »

« 3 personas, 44 días, 11 países, 18 vuelos, 60.000 kilómetros, 1 volcan en erupción, 2 cámaras y casi un terabyte de grabación… todo para convertir 3 ambiciosos conceptos lineales basados en el movimiento, en aprender y en la comida… en 3 preciosos y esperamos que convincentes cortos… muévete, come, aprende »

 

RickMereki : Director, producer, additional camera and editing
Tim White : DOP, producer, primary editing, sound
Andrew Lees : Actor, mover, groover

These films were commissioned by STA Travel Australia: youtube.com/watch?v=Xc0d510zTA4

Thanks heaps to Adam Fyfe, Brendan, Simon and Crissy at STA.

All Music composed and performed by Kelsey James kelseyanne.james@gmail.com
Soundtrack available here:
itunes.apple.com/au/album/whistle-if-you-need-me-learn/id456230196

Music Recorded and mixed by Jake Phillips

Colour Grade : Edel Rafferty and Roslyn Di sisto
Online Edit : Peter Mirecki

Assistance in titles and production design : Lee Gingold, Jason Milden, Rohan Newman

« Big Ups to Michelle, Kiri, Renee, Hana, Andre, Ross, Bernie & Julie for your patience and support and awesomeness... Huge Thanks to : Marco, Juliana and Julio at GAP Argentina and Peru Ariana Cardenas, Toni Figuera and cooltra scooters in Barcelona, Abete Zanetti Glass blowing school, Murano, Venice abatezanetti.it Annabel, Rosario and Carolina (Pitu) in France, Juane and Andrea from the Princeca Insolenta hostel in Chile. Thank you all for your kind words and encouragement. The response has been phenomenal and overwhelming. We never thought this little project would reach out to so many people. x »

Rick Mereki

The ABC of Architects...

« This work is an alphabetical list of the most important architects with their best known building.
A lot of them have been left out with grief because we only need one for each letter and we done an effort to have differents nationalities.
If you love architecture, for more staff you can follow us in www.ombuarchitecture.tumblr.com

Concept and Animation: Andrea Stinga, Federico Gonzalez
Art Direction: Federico Gonzalez
Music: The Butterfly from Eugene C.Rose and George Ruble, (Creative Commons)

Here is the alphabetical list.

Alvar AAlto _ Säynätsalo Town hall - Finland
Luis Barragán _ satellite towers - Mexico city
Santiago Calatrava _ Lyon - Satolas airport railway station - lyon France
Luís Domènech i Montaner _ Antoni Tàpies foundation - Barcelona
Eduardo Souto de Moura _ Paula Rego's House of Stories _ Cascais _ portugal
Norman Foster_ London City Hall _ England
frank Gehry _ Guggenheim bilbao _ Spain
herzog & de meuron _ Beijing National Stadium _ CHina
Arata Isozaki _ Palau Sant Jordi _ barcelona
Philip Johnson _ The Glass House _ New Canaan _ United state
Louis Kahn _ National Parliament of Bangladesh _ Dhaka city
le corbusier _ Villa Savoye _ Poissy, Francia
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe _ barcelona pavilion _ Spain
oscar niemeyer _ National Congress of Brazil, Brasília
Joseph Maria Olbrich _ Secession building, vienna - Austria
César Pelli _ Petronas Twin Tower _ Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Giacomo Quarenghi _ the Smolny Institute _ St. Petersburg, Russia.
Renzo Piano + Richard Rogers _ Pompidou Centre _ Paris, Francia
Álvaro Siza _ Ibere camargo foundation _ porto alegre _ Brazil
kenzo Tange _ Tokyo Olympic Stadium - Japan
Jørn Utzon _ Sydney Opera House _ Australia
William Van Alen _ Chrysler Building _ New York City
frank lloyd wright _ guggenheim new york _ United state
Iannis Xenakis _ Philips pavilion _ Expo '58 in Brussels
Minoru Yamasaki _ World Trade Center
Zaha Hadid_The Pierres Vives building _ Montpellier, France » 

the retro 'fixies'...

...the fixed-gear bikes are back... and it seems they'll stay for a while... a new-old sustainable urban movement.

« Fixies came out of urban messenger culture, and in the past few years have taken on a life of their own. Messengers used fixed-gear bikes because they were cheap, fast, and durable. A master fixie rider exudes a skateboarderly sense of balance and rhythm and physical grace, merging the ability to zip through traffic quick, and then come to a perfect standing stop upon the pedals at just the right moment, defying gravity and leaving car-bound onlookers stuck in glacial traffic feeling as uncool as a Segway-rider. » 

Extract from egg branding.com

Do you remember pedaling your old fixed-gear bike? Are you able to remember that sense of freedom? To enjoy the fixie feeling this beautiful video from Saigon. 

*Thanks Vu to share it with me

in rem verso...

To where you came from:
A project on the concept of unjust enrichment and natural forms of poetic revenge from Santiago Morilla

«I like interventions that can only be seen from above. And from there working on the whole idea of spontaneous constructions, coded messages and punk response drawings mainly in a rural environment.

There’s a legal statute, a concept in Roman law that to my mind connects aesthetically with the idea I’m talking about, and it’s the “action of reimbursement” or ACTIO IN REM VERSO. We’re talking about an action of reimbursement after a legal but unjust enrichment… (silence) with property, but also with land, or with land speculation, or with natural resources, because who does the countryside belong to? The ACTIO IN REM VERSO is intended to reimburse this impoverishment in certain cases of illicit net enrichment.

When you do an intervention on the ground thinking about how it’ll be reflected on a map or from the air, you’ve got three views of the work… four. They’re three layers that overlap in a fourth layer of understanding. I mean, first you have the normal view, deformed and incomplete, kind of at ground level; second you have the aerial view, colder and more objective, that you can see from a light aircraft, balloon, etc… third you have the mediated view… And lastly the documentary view of the stop-motion video, overlapping all the layers within the timeline. That way it creates a view of what happened there that’s always incomplete…»

Extract from a conversation with Santiago. 

Eduardo Hurtado. September (2012)

"In rem verso" at José Robles Art Gallery, Madrid.

Djahazi: from container to content

... in the name of art?...

The comorians have used for many centuries the djahazi, an ancient wooden boat, as the only mean of transport to communicate and create commercial relations with their neighbors in the Mozambique channel. In modern times they used the traditional boats to transport the shipping containers from the cargo boats to the ports until their use was banned in 2006. 

The djahazis were left to sink in the port of Moroni and most of the dockers were unemployed...

The italian artist Paolo W. Tamburella travelled to the Comoros knowing about the end of these traditional boats with the goal of fixing one of them and take it, as the first participation of the Comoro Islands, to the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). 
«Tamburella has fixed and restored one of the twenty eight boats forsaken at the port, with the help of workers from Moroni, but not as an antiquarian and nostalgic affectation. On the contrary, in Venice, this vessel, which will be loaded with a regular shipping container used in most of today’s trade, will stand as a metaphor for an ambivalent globality, bringing together hope and despair [...] emergence and emergency, in a sort of cautionary tale about the new forms of the expendable in a world of uncertainty and transition[...].» (Octavio Zaya, in the Biennale General Catalogue).

In the port of Moroni the djahazi boat was split in half and placed in a 40 feet container that travelled from Comoros to Marghera, an industrial district outside Venice. 

Two weeks before the opening of the Biennale the container, the artist and the dockers will arrive in Venice. The Djahazi will be reassembled, loaded with a shipping container as it was up to 2006, to finally dock in the water area in front of the main entrance to the Giardini for all the duration of the Biennale.