it feels a bit strange offering financial help to one of the (probably) best-paid graphic designers around, nontheless i really want to see the finished result… so along with quite a lot of other people i helped ‘stefan sagmeister’ find the funding for his ‘happy’ film, which is due for release next february…
photography, as the demise of gadaffi once again proved, can be a highly graphic, instant & effective medium to share the terrible events which take place in the world to a large audience, it can however also be used to show positive messages too
like these series of ‘before and after’ images showing the progress being made by the japanese population to restore their country six months after the devastating tsunami
i couldn’t decide which ones to show apparently, so it’s a bit of a long ‘picture post’ this one…
last week i attended the ‘awards’ awards night organised by ‘lernert & sander’ in amsterdam, the event was a highly entertaining tongue-in-cheek look at the world of art awards
it is very difficult to describe just exactly what made it so entertaining, the event has also not been very well documented unfortunately, highlights were the trick played on the jury, who were unwittingly recorded during the jury deliberations, on the night itself three well known dutch actors were then hired to replay their conversations live on stage, giving the public a unique and frank insight into what was discussed and how… the jury were very sporting about the whole send-up and chairman ‘hedy d’ancona’ even provided a great thank you speech accompanied by her fellow jury members, stood next to their respective ‘body doubles’ dressed in identical clothes… great fun
it was also very fitting that the jury didn’t manage to choose a winner in the end, another highlight was this classical rendition by the ‘familie pondman’ (a musical family that have recently been the subject of a much talked about documentary) who did a very special version (shown below) of a recent awards acceptance speech made by dutch-moroccan actor nasrdin dchar at the dutch film awards
this all won’t make much sense if you don’t understand dutch however, as i said it is very difficult to describe the evenings events in a coherent way… as they say ‘you had to be there’
young student joris van megen visited the studio last week and one of the projects he showed me was his ‘zwart geld’ or rather ‘black money’ the dutch term for black market money, a series of banknotes made with black copy toner on black paper
the dutch term for laundering illegal money is ‘witwassen’ or rather ‘whitewashing’, joris experimented with different techniques before coming up with bleach as a means of transforming the notes to ‘visible’ money, the bleach appears to affect the dyes used in the paper without affecting the black toner, creating this literal ‘reveal effect’, very nice…
he left a copy behind, which gives me a dilemma: do i tell the taxman or not?