Friday night we hosted a private-public screening of Efterklang & Vincent Moon’s film An Island at our studio. It was a lot of fun, and a very lovely experience to watch the movie with old friends and new friends. Thank you for coming by everyone! If this inspires you to host a screening of the film, we can definitely recommend it! Click here to find out more. There are now over 500 private-public screenings all over the world – except in Africa. Come on Africa!
Last year we participated in a project initiated by Ralph Lauren called Art Stars, in which we and 50 other artists were asked to decorate a denim star. Later all the stars were exhibited in London and auctioned away in order to raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust.
Now Ralph Lauren is inviting new artists to make a star of their own! All you have to do is upload your idea before Friday February 4th on the Art Stars website.
The two winners of the competition will get a chance to work on their star at our studio for one week each, along with a 1000 € prize and extra 500 € for materials. So if you have a good idea, go ahead and submit – we look forward to working with you!
Here are some photos of how we made our star last year. We tailor made a slim-fit-suit for it, that was sewn together from various pieces of denim fabric that we hand-dyed. Photos by Sam Christmas and us.
We will be giving a guest talk at the Danish School of Media and Journalism this Friday, January 21st at 2.15 PM.
The talk, which is supported by Polo Jeans Co. Ralph Lauren is open to the public and is part of a project called Art Stars that we participated in last year in which we, alongside other young artists, decorated a large star that was later auctioned off in order to raise money for teenagers with cancer. This will also be a call for entries for a new competition that the company is arranging for the same cause. More on this later!
The talk is open for everyone, so come on by! We will be speaking Danish though.
Danish School of Media and Journalism
Auditorium 1.05 Storauditoriet
Emdrupvej 72, DK-2400 NV
Read more here
Merry Christmas everyone!
And a Happy New Year.
Thank you for following our blog.
We’ll be back in the new year, see you on the other side!
0 Comments Christmas Market, Daniel Frost, Hanna Terese Nilsson, Inka, Jody Barton, Julemarked, Rasmus Svensson, Rumraket
Sorry for the long silence. We are now back in business after several months of part time working, part time traveling and raising new family members! Sofie got a puppy a couple of months ago, called Yuki. She is the cutest dog ever, but also quite a bit of work until she is a grownup dog, so that’s been taking up a lot of time. Meanwhile Nan Na has been on several tours with Efterklang. From Memphis to New York, followed by Iceland airwaves and a short trip to Berlin to decorate Efterklang’s new studio.
This is for the people in Copenhagen:
Lørdag d. 14. august holder vi gårdloppemarked sammen med Retrosales og Din Nye Ven + venner og naboer, ved vores værksted i Sankt Peders Stræde 47. Vi vil bl.a. sælge plakater, t-shirts og muleposer + vores egne lopper. Vi håber at ser jer!
We just returned from an amazing Roskilde Festival! It has been 4 days of fantastic music, friends, fun times, sunshine, camping and dancing. Both Efterklang and Turboweekend played at the festival, both were brilliant as usual, and the audience loved them. We also got to spend some time with the National, who played an amazing show too – and it was very nice to meet Bryce and Padma again, who are also members of the band Clogs, that we have recently created artwork for.
It’s July, the sun is shining, and our basement studio is far too dark to spend time in right now. So we have decided to take the month off, which means we will be away until the beginning of August. This also means that there probably won’t be much activity on the blog until we are back.
Have a great summer!
Efterklang
Turboweekend
The National
1 Comment Clogs, Efterklang, Roskilde Festival, The National, Turboweekend
The day before yesterday we had a guest talk at CAFA, Central Academy of Fine Arts – our last one on this trip. Our Chinese friend, Been had been so kind as to arrange everything for us. We also got to meet Professor Xiaoyong, a famous designer and professor of graphic design at CAFA. We didn’t have much time to see the school, but hopefully we’ll be able to go back one day and see more.
After our guest talk, we had a cup of coffee with our Danish friend Sidsel Tuxen who is studying at the architecture department at CAFA this semester. She had made two new Chinese friends with really cool Western names – Highway and Oxygen. Later Oxygen, Been and a bunch of her friends then joined us for dinner at a nearby restaurant. We ended the day with Jessica on a roof top bar with a magnificent view of the forbidden city. Beijing is a magical city.
Yesterday we did some regular tourist business, and we also visited our friend Jessica at the architect office where she works, called Dada.
And now our trip is nearly coming to an end! It has been an absolutely amazing experience for us to visit China. Tomorrow we are flying back to Denmark, back to our little basement studio. We are looking forward to seeing our friends, family and most of all our (other) better halves…
Sculptures at CAFA
Tourist business included visiting the galleries of 798. This photo is from Olafur Eliasson and Ma Yansong’s collaboration at UCCA. It’s a giant room filled with colored lights and smoke, an amazing experience.
2 Comments 798, Been Design, Beijing, CAFA, Ma Yansong, Olafur Eliasson, Sidsel Tuxen, UCCA, Xiaoyong
Yesterday was the first day of our workshop with the students of LAFA. A lot of details got lost in translation but we’ll see tomorrow if they understood what the homework was about. We’ve asked the students to fold a plate of food out of paper, so hopefully we’ll see lots of nice paperwork tomorrow. After the workshop we just walked around on campus and did some shopping in the students’ supermarket, where there’s a special sale on chicken feet.
Today we went on a sightseeing tour of Dalian with Mr. Lu (one of the teachers at LAFA), Mu and one of the founding sisters of Dalian based design company, Aissen. They took us out to the shore and it was very nice to see some more natural and picturesque surroundings, without skyscrapers or construction sites. It seems like the Chinese never sleep, and are always keen to build new buildings all over the place.
After another fabulous lunch, we went to meet the founders and designers of Aissen. We gave them a short introduction to our work, and they showed us some of theirs in return. After that we shared our experiences of Danish and Chinese design culture and traditions. It seems like it’s a tough world out here, and we felt very privileged to have the freedom that we have in our work. The two sisters of Aissen started their company 8 years ago and it has now grown to a staff of 15 people. Maybe we’ll also have 15 employees in 4 years… but probably not!
We can’t get over how extremely friendly and hospitable the people we meet out here are. They drive us around, pay for our food and give us gifts and make us feel very special and welcome.
Students sketches for our workshop
Amazing painting skills in the textile studio
Thread and yarn in the tapestry studio
The LAFA basketball court
View of Dalian from a hill
A kite over Renmin Square
Meeting with Aissen: once again Mu is translating our words to the staff and to the two sisters and managers to the right
The design team at Aissen
View of Dalian from the Aissen office on the 27th floor. Before we came, we had never even heard of Dalian, and it turns out that there are more inhabitants in this city than in the whole of Denmark! Not so surprising maybe…