mono.kultur #32: Martino Gamper

Dear Friends,

with summer dropping in and out every now and then, we finally and happily present our latest issue featuring the unmistakeable Martino Gamper – and about high time, admittedly. But: dedicating a tasty 10,000-word interview to the charm and wit of the Italian product designer in a volume ripe with food for the mind and the eye, it is the kind of issue we believe was worth the wait.

And indeed, Martino Gamper is the kind of product designer we all have been waiting for: Brimming with ideas, energy and humour, his designs are disarmingly irreverent and irresistibly fun, and unlike anything one will see in the puristic galleries of contemporary design. Crossing over from studying sculpture to completing an MA in product design at the prestigious Royal College of Art under Ron Arad, Gamper has had little time to worry over the theoretical do’s and don’t’s of his profession – instead, he has followed a simple rule of learning by doing, meaning: the more you do, the more you learn.

At a time where design is overly concerned with form and less so with function, Gamper is not all too bothered with either, but rather with how design might affect the everyday. Coming to attention in 2007 with his epic project 100 Chairs in 100 Days, where he assembled discarded furniture and waste material into curious and charismatic new pieces, considering the history of materials as well as the context of his work has become an important element of Gamper’s practice, which sits comfortably and playfully between the worlds of industrial design and fine art.

If anything, his work is driven by an insatiable curiosity and openness, which is also expressed by the frequent collaborations with friends from different fields. Martino Gamper treats his work as a means of communication and interaction, by frequently inviting visitors and passers-by on the street to join and engage, or by creating not only the furniture, but also improvising the 7 course-menus for his legendary Trattoria pop-up dinner evenings – elevating, as an inevitable and highly welcome side effect, design into a profoundly social activity.

With mono.kultur, Martino Gamper talked about his idea of fun, why a chair is the ultimate challenge and what design has in common with cooking.

Visually, the issue is bursting with references and ideas, reclaiming image material from left and right, while unveiling the structure of a book with three booklets of different sizes all lovingly assembled into one – and manually at that, which makes for some rough edges or rather what we like to call extra personality.

As of here and now, the issue is available through our online store mono.konsum, and at a trusted art book dealer of your choice very soon indeed.
In the meantime, enjoy the remains of summer, and with our warmest regards,
mono.kultur

D 5€ EU 6€ WW 7€

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Akerselva-Oslo 2004-2011  by Johan De Wilde.

Between 2004 and 2011 Johan De Wilde went for brisk walks along the River Akerselva, which divides the city of Oslo into two parts, east and west. He kept a photographic record of four of those walks, collected together in Akerselva-Oslo 2004-2011. The artist creates an abstraction, a suggestion, a series of images that glides past in time and space, peopled by abandoned objects, chance passers-by who give the impression of being part of a story only to step out of it in the next picture. He accepts threat, mental and physical obstacles and minuscule events in a bid to evoke that curious feeling which is so closely linked in its interpretation to life as it happens.

D 50  € 

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137 Master Pieces

Booking done by Bettina Mönch, Leipzig.
The book is printed with a Risograph GR 3770.
Concept and design by Jungundwenig and Mathias Reynoird.

D 30€

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FESPA Digital / Fruit Logistica.

Vor einem guten Jahr besuchte Wolfgang Tillmans die Berliner Messe “Fruit Logistica”, das führende Branchentreffen der internationalen Fruchthandelswelt. “Dort gingen mir die Augen über angesichts der verrückten Displays und der Vielfalt und Komplexheit des internationalen Fruchthandels und seiner Verarbeitungsmaschinen. Darauf reagierte ich sofort mit der Kamera, habe die Bilder aber dann erstmal liegen lassen, um sie mit Abstand betrachten zu können, obwohl ich gleich an ein Künstlerbuch im “Concorde”- Format dachte”. Jetzt liegt es vor!

D 19.80 €

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You Killed Me First: The Cinema Of Transgression.

Albtraumhafte Gewaltszenarien, dramatische Seelenzustände, perverse sexuelle Abgründe: Die bewußt auf Schock, Provokation und Konfrontation angelegten Filme des Cinema of Transgression zeugen von einer außergewöhnlichen Radikalität. In den 1980er Jahren ging eine Gruppe von Filmemachern in der New Yorker Lower East Side auf Kollisionskurs mit der amerikanischen Gesellschaft. Alle moralischen und ästhetischen Grenzen überschreitend, enthüllten sie in ihren Filmen eine soziale Härte, die auf gesellschaftspolitische Gleichgültigkeit trifft. In den teilweise mit geklautem Kameraequipment gedrehten Low-Budget-Filmen manifestieren sich scharfe Analysen des von Kriminalität, Brutalität, Drogen, Aids, Sex und Exzessen geprägten Lebens in der Lower East Side. Standphotos, Bildausschnitte, Flugblätter und die harte Typographie vermitteln perfekt die Ernsthaftigkeit der Künstler.

Nightmarish scenarios of violence, dramatic states of mind, and perverse sexual abysses – the films of the Cinema of Transgression that were consciously aimed at shock, provocation, and confrontation, bear witness to an extraordinary radicality. In the 1980s a group of filmmakers from the Lower East Side in New York went on a collision course with the conventions of American society. Transcending all moral or aesthetic boundaries, the low budget films reveal social hardship met with sociopolitical indifference. Sometimes shot with stolen camera equipment, the films contain strident analyses of life in the Lower East Side defined by criminality, brutality, drugs, AIDS, sex, and excess. The catalogue is published on the occasion of the worldwide first exhibition on the Cinema of Transgression, YOU KILLED ME FIRST at KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin. The catalogue includes contributions by Sylvère Lotringer, Carlo McCormick, Jonas Mekas, Susanne Pfeffer, Jack Sargeant and Nick Zedd.

D 15€

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Love Book by Aneta Grzeszykowska, published by Raster.

“Photography is the amorous fetish par excellence, a fragment of the present that, like the relation between two lovers, links and realizes both the past and the future and, in doing so, deranges time altogether.” Eduardo Cadava

The primary medium in which Aneta Grzeszykowska works is photography. However, she treats it instrumentally, as a tool for the realization of advanced, artistic and ontological exercises. The artist is interested in the role photography plays in creating and documenting a personal identity. Therefore, in her film projects or doll sculptures, the human figure acquires the shape and aura of a marionette. One of the main topics of Grzeszykowska’s works is her own identity, with which she plays on many levels: by erasing her own figure from a family collection of photographs (Album, 2005), or by impersonating Cindy Sherman in her classic cycle Untitled Film Stills (2006). Some projects by Grzeszykowska – like the cycle of illusionist portraits of non-existent people (Untitled, 2006) – take advantage of the possibilities offered by digital image manipulation, while others use photography and film in a classic way by emphasizing the performative dimension of the artist’s activities. The motifs which she obsessively returns to in her works are absence, invisibility, disappearing, and the confrontation of body and thought with non-existence.

Teksty / Texts: Krzysztof Pijarski, Walter Seidl, in both English and Polish
Softcover with 143 pages.

Available for distribution.

D 25 €

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Skalitzer 68. 04.08.2012
Camera Austria – Magazine presentation, drinks and BBQ
Natalie Czech – Book launch, presentation and Q&A
Starts at 7.00 pm.

The theme of Camera Austria’s new issue (#118) is “Photography_Text”, which ensues from the observation that contemporary photographic artists are increasingly associating text and image mediums; a practice at the base of German artist Natalie Czech.
At “Skalitzer. 68″ the magazine and the artist will plan a joint presentation, following the intense collaboration they had in the creation of this issue, where author Jens Asthoff discovers how Natalie Czech, through her photographs, investigates language as a space of contingency, probes boundaries of meaning, experiments with word-image relations, and encourages stratifications of intertextuality to intersect with and permeate one another. In his literary contribution, Barry Schwabsky poses exploratory questions about Czech’s work: “Is it possible to see her work as one enormous love letter: a billet-doux to poetry?” and notes that the last thing lovers want to give up is the possibility of gazing at the beloved: “Photographing poetry means gazing at it.”
In the same occasion, Natalie Czech’s recently published monography “Je n’ai rien à dire. Seulement à montrer. / Ich habe nichts zu sagen. Nur zu zeigen. / I have nothing to say. Only to show” (Spector Books, 2012) will be officially presented and open to discussion with the artist.

http://www.natalieczech.de/
http://www.camera-austria.at/
http://www.spectorbooks.com/

Further programme details

Mazdaznan – Health & Breath Culture (first six exercises) by Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha’nish. M.D. Open Editions & Stanley Picker Gallery (Kingston University)

This book explores the intimate relationship between Mazdaznan, Johannes Itten and the Vorkurs (Preliminary or Foundation Course) at the Bauhaus, Weimar. It is a practical guide to performing the exercises that Itten taught at the Bauhaus and a celebration of a moment of mysticism at the heart of Modernism.

Illustrated and appended by Ian Whittlesea
Pages: 67
Size: 19 x 13 cm

D 20 €

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and then we mad & qijyss nlff isssw myttl. Fabian Marti

This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibitions
“Fabian Marti, Time for the Monkeys to Move into Hyperspace”
Manor-Kunstpreis Kanton Zurich, 2011 Kunstmuseum Winterhur, and
“and then we mad & qijyss nlff isssw myttl” in Kunstverein Braunschweig e.V. 2012.

D 25 €

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Nachtigall by Lena Grass

Nachtigall (Nightingale)
Release: 2012
First Edition, 100 Copies

Nachtigall is about the sensation of being out at night, when darkness embraces you. About the search for one’s identity,for what is left in solitude.

D 24 €

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