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On our way from Reykjavik to Siglufjordur we stopped – among other places – at Hofsos, a village with a natural harbour which made it one of Iceland’s oldest trading posts. We strolled along the basalt column coastline until our bus driver picked us up again. He drove along at lightning speed, only slowing down for sheep or when a police 4×4 was in sight. Apart from ferrying passengers up north our driver doubled as postman, delivering everything from food for petrol station shops and spare parts for garages to fish for friends in the villages along the way.

This is Herhusid, our home for the next four weeks. The residency centre, an old prayer house and former Salvation Army post, sits right in the centre of Siglufjordur. The town on the northern coast of Iceland was the country’s herring capital until its heyday ended with the world economic depression of 1929 and the decline of fish stocks. Siglufjordur is set on a small peninsula in a fjord with blueberry-loaded hillsides, grazing sheep, ptarmigan and small waterfalls. We’ll explore and will keep you posted.

Checking out the online weather forecast in our flat above the studio.

Design can be understood as adding value – it is employed to add value to materials and objects to generate a commercial profit and functional, emotional benefit in the process.

Based on the rules of a popular German children’s game, the students take this notion to the extreme and create their design piece or design inspiration from and apple and an egg.

The rules of the game:

At the beginning of the project the students split in groups of two to three people and each group will be given an apple and an egg. This is their capital for this project. Now it is up to each team to make the most of their capital by finding people who will trade with them.

The following days we create design proposals and projects from the inspiration and the objects traded on day one.

How could anyone resist trading with Magali and Juliette?

...but what to make of it all?

Projects emerge from the trade -by Clara, Nina & Yuan

development of the ideas - by Nina & Pierre

…and on to the final presentation tomorrow, with our ‘external examiner’ David Dubois…

For the Saloni di Mobile in Milano we built a workshop in Galleria Nilufar.
Instead of finished products we brought 8 kg of kelp from Japan and Ireland and our tools with us and produced the finished pieces in the gallery. There was a real buzz about the new material and our visitors were very excited to mbe able to see the whole working process and touch the material in its different stages of prodcution: dried, re-hydrated, stretched, varnished, unvarnished.

The Irish kelp turned out to be beautifully translucent and green whereas the Japanese Kombu was much browner and hard, almost like a 70′s plastic.

You can find a video of the opening on Core 77 and more images on Dezeen

S-AIR presents the work of their current residents Yen-Yi Chen (Taiwan) and Julia Lohmann (UK).
When?

08.12.07-16.12.07, 12.00-19.00 h

Private View: Saturday 08.12. from 17.00
Artist Talk: Sunday 09.12. from 14.00
Where?

Japanese speakers please see the flyer below. When you stand in front of Tokyo Hands in Sapporo the exhibition is two houses down to your right, on the sixth floor. There is a wooden carved elephant in front of the building.

Gero spent his last night in Japan in a Tokyo capsule hotel, the pinnacle of anonymous abodes. The tiny pods, stacked like bunk beds, twenty per hallway, in who knows how many hallways on six floors, looked like leftovers from the film set of 2001 – A Space Odyssey. The light of capsule 5008 glowed like the eye of HAL. Guests in this men only establishment are issued with pale blue pyjamas and a towel and then left to their own devices in the maze of the hotel. There are communal TV lounges, baths, and infinite-looking washrooms full of mirrors, probably to counter claustrophobia. Most guests prefer to stay in their capsules though, entertaining themselves with a small TV set with channels ranging from traditional Japanese pottery to hardcore Japanese porn.

Capsule 5008

Somewhere in the infinite washroom

The ever-present ‘No Yakuza’ signs