one smalls seed issue 3

sowing since 2005

the south african contemporary culture magazine

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09 ¦picasso comes to africa 12 ¦dutch dynamic hans van bentem and dutch eccentricity 15 ¦the cape francolin art hotel riebeeck kasteel’s edge 19 ¦red eye art more than just a one night stand (with art) 23 ¦the new noir photographer, tom buchanan, oozing creativity and passion 30 ¦eline keller-sørensen obsesses about cars 37 ¦rotterdam - a rising phoenix 43 ¦the rebirth of jozi 47 ¦holcim awards for sustainable construction 50 ¦the grace of a swan katherine mortner award winning fashion designer 59 ¦filling up with rocketfuel product design powered by passion, inspiration and an appetite for the extreme.

62 ¦mojo at last, an honest store 66 ¦cutting edge design matt black 69 ¦once bitten live action and 3D animation with a bite 72 ¦designer coffee cup sleeves 76 ¦book review 90 ¦scientific sound chromoscience 93 ¦gold fingers redefining electro-jazz 96 ¦relax with their unique sounds 98 ¦music reviews 100 ¦audio visual cutting and splicing with sa’s top vj’s 104 ¦cinema’s first genius charlie chaplin 108 ¦digital future dv8 takes digital filmmaking to new heights 110 ¦cellphone cinema 112 ¦movie reviews 114 ¦dvd reviews 120 ¦instant grass sprouting the latest trends 122¦loading... creative websites 126¦enter leading competitions

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third issue founder and editor-in-chief giuseppe russo graphic designer tracey-lee scully advertising executive erinn williams editorial contributors mia russell, dylan culhane, leigh van den berg, kobus van der merwe, tracey farren, eeshaam september, zane henry, jenna mervis, liana turner, lucille davie, gail smith, ann douglas photographers jan turnbull, tom buchanan, jacques kloppers, danie nel, eva kruijwijk, james strack, julien robillard, dylan culhane, hans renner, liana turner cover

concept and art direction designed04 / giuseppe russo, photographer debra roets, stylist robin osrin, make-up jonathan bernard, model henri landon, clothing the young designers emporium in collaboration with one league

special thanks margherita felitti, pietro russo, jimmy strats, barbara bassi, richard rubenstein, mtkidu, sacha polkey, andrew addison, rosalinda, bridgett stanford, celeste horn, jan turnbull, eugene nortje, julien robillard, mercia van wijk, christian fixl, lori mauerberger, lea levy, amelia burger, eva kruijwijk, wout de vringer, duncan ringrose, dutch ministry of foreign affairs editorial address: 5 constitution street, east city precinct, cape town, 8001 tel: +27 (0) 21 461 6973 ÂŚ fax: +27 (0) 21 461 9558 email: contact@onesmallseed.com published by designed04 advertising sales and subscription enquiries: +27 (0) 21 461 6973, contact@onesmallseed.com The small print: No responsibility can be taken for the quality and accuracy of the reproductions, as this is dependent on the quality of the material supplied. No responsibility can be taken for typographical errors. The publishers reserve the right to refuse and edit material. All prices and specifications are subject to change without notice. The opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the publisher. No responsibility will be taken for any decision made by the reader as a result of such opinions. Copyright one small seed South Africa. All rights reserved. Both the name ‘one small seed’ and are copyright protected. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written consent from the publisher. one small seed does not accept responsibility for unsolicited material. This is a quarterly publication. ISSN 1816-8965.

a new look While the number three will have a different meaning for everyone, to us it means our third and thickest issue to date and one that sees a significant change. Having introduced readers to the identity of one small seed through the use of a strong neutral cover for the first two issues, the third issue sees a shift to a graphic cover in order to convey the vision of the magazine and the one small seed movement as a whole. The use of a flag symbolises the identity of the magazine, whilst at the same time incorporating and conveying the image of the one small seed movement itself and the inspiration behind it.

In this issue we go Dutch - we travel to Rotterdam, which is fast-becoming known as the architectural capital of Europe and we take a closer look at artist Hans van Bentem, whose quirky creativity gives the Dutch embassy in Pretoria a facelift.

We explore the ever-changing world of design through the eyes of its creators like Matt Black and Graeme Carr and get introduced to the digital world of VJ’s. Keeping our hearts close to home, we spend some time with the hottest new addition on the electronica scene, Goldfish and follow their unprecedented rise to stardom; we get into the head of local photographer Tom Buchanan and check out his latest exhibition and visit the beautiful Cape Francolin Hotel in Riebeeck-Kasteel.

We hope this third edition is everything you expect and more.

Ideas are the root of creation and we are always open to new thoughts, creative expressions and welcome any feedback, so please don’t hesitate to email us at feedback@onesmallseed. com. Your creativity is our inspiration and our aim is to create a magazine that wholly encompasses freedom of expression and challenges ideals.

giuseppe russo founder and editor-in-chief

easel by emmarentia van der merwe, artist

picasso comes to africa Pablo Picasso straddles modern art like a Colossus. A prolific producer of sculpture, painting, prints and ceramics, Picasso’s creative output spanned a period of 75 years and made him one of the undisputed masters of modern art. By Gail Smith South African artists, students and art-lovers interested in the works of this master have previously had to travel abroad to see the original work, but now an exhibition entitled Picasso and Africa will bring more than 60 paintings, drawing and sculptures dating from 1906 to 1972 to Johannesburg and Cape Town.

The Picasso and Africa exhibition is a collaboration between Standard Bank, Air France, Iziko Museums and the French Institute. The exhibition is widely regarded as one of the most significant exhibitions to take place in South Africa. “This exhibition is not simply a collection of Picasso’s work,” says Marilyn Martin, Director of Art Collections at Iziko South African National Gallery and one of the curators of Picasso and Africa. “There’s never been an exhibition like this before,” says Martin. “The works are being seen in the context of African art and focus on the importance of African art in relation to modern art and its influence on Picasso.

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“Picasso was not only influenced by African art...

“He was one of the most fascinating artists in the history of art and is regarded by most as the greatest artist of the 20th century and his influence on 20th century art was enormous,” says Martin. “And then there’s the persona of Picasso that was incredibly strong, he was charismatic and the stories about all the women and love affairs make for a complex and compelling picture. This exhibition is not only significant, it’s long overdue,” says artist Thembinkosi Goniwe. “It’s always us Africans who have go to the west to stage our cultural production and present our ideas for legitimacy. And now Picasso is coming to our country.

“Picasso is so complex and yet managed to simplify complex ideas shifted with so many different movements and worked in various mediums. He’s a master in the art world and what’s exciting for me about Picasso is that he has always taken risks and set a precedent about what art is supposed to be and found different ways of visualising the way things are meant to be.”

Goniwe, who is currently a doctoral candidate at Cornell University says that Picasso was not only influenced by African masks and sculptures, but also engaged with African and Caribbean artists, scholars and intellectuals who were his contemporaries and that this engagement had a significant impact on his work. “Picasso was not only influenced by African art, but also by ideas about Africa and conversations he had with African artists about art and its complexity and its cultural and social influence.”

Martin says the impact on African art on Picasso’s work is undisputed. “He was interested in the ritualistic aspect of African art. African art, like Picasso’s art, is not about describing things, but about conveying the idea of things and people. The influence of African art on Picasso can be seen in the works he produced from 1907-1909,” says Martin.

... but also by ideas about Africa and conversations he had with African artists about art and its complexity and its cultural and social influence.”

This page // Top: Woman with joined hands (Study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) Spring 1907, 90,5 x 71,5, Oil on canvas, Musée Picasso, Paris. © Photo RMN, Sucession Picasso, R. G. Ojeda.

Bottom: ‘Three figures under a tree’ Autumn 1907, 99 x 99, oil on canvas, Musee Picasso, Paris.

Photo RMN. R G Ojeda © Succession Picasso 2006 - DALRO. Next page // Top: ‘Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon’ 1907, 96 x 92, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Printed with permission from City Press. First published in Pulse magazine 22 January 2006.

“We didn’t want just another Picasso exhibition,” says Martin. “We wanted something that would link the work to a particular context.” The collection on its way to South Africa includes works that communicate most clearly Africa’s impact on Picasso and will include a selection of African sculptures similar to those that influenced Picasso. Among the visible African influences in the works of Picasso are the many oddly shaped mask-like faces, earth tones, wild animals, bulls and other horned creatures and in his wooden sculptures. The African influence can be seen most strikingly in one of Picasso’s most famous works, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Goniwe says the exhibition is a great moment for South Africa. “Visual art has not been taken seriously in this country and to bring an artist of such a calibre should encourage authorities and key players and business to begin to support visual artists,” says Goniwe. “Art is not just for display, it’s also about history. Picasso’s works speak to social and political events and to personal experiences.

The exhibition should encourage South Africans to understand that we do have our own Picassos. It will give a sense of significance to our work.”

The Picasso and Africa exhibition runs at the Standard Bank Gallery (011 631 1889) in Johannesburg from February 10 to March 19 and at the Iziko South African Gallery (021 467 4660) in Cape Town from April 13 to May 21. The exhibition will include extensive workshops and educational programmes for teachers and their pupils.

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hans van bentem

dutch dynamic

Commissioned to create a sculpture for the Dutch Embassy in Pretoria, Hans van Bentem gives us a taste of Dutch eccentricity. By Tracey Farren

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They flew Hans Van Bentem out for two days to see the site of his commission. Staring at the grey gates of the Dutch Embassy in Tshwane (Pretoria), no national symbols came to mind. Instead, a strange cluster of animals and humans, from the future and ancient times, took up state in his imagination.

They rallied on the imposing columns, insisting that an extra column be built to represent the step into another man’s land. They were gaudy, humourous characters, already looking forward to the surprise of the passers-by. These creatures are currently being built in Rotterdam at Struktuur 68, Studio for Monumental Ceramics and will be inaugurated in their chosen home on 18th April this year. Once they are up, people walking the staid street might construe the sculpture as caprice, some act of rebellion. On the contrary, Hans works to unify, cheekily dissolving divisions between classes, cultures, even periods of time, calmly overlooking history’s efforts to divide. He sees no cleave between renaissance works and comic book art. He has a passion for hi-tech and gadgets, movies and computer 3D, but he says, “I am usually standing with my hands in clay, applying some ancient technique.”

Even as a child, Hans felt no need to rebel. He grew up in The Hague, where he and his friends read comics, lapped up cinema, revelled in the visual culture of the seventies. There were no other artists in his family, but Hans drew compulsively and made models just for fun.

When he was about fifteen, he created a bright sculpture of himself, going punk with a brilliant green mohawk. He loved the bright façade and the slight thrill of shock he triggered in the street.

This impulse to create public art soon flowed into his work. His first choice of study was large-scale painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in The Hague. From the start, Hans sidestepped the separate and the inaccessible and was keen to create art that everybody could enter. His murals evolved into monumental, ceramic sculptures. He had no taste for the minimalism of the time and quickly claimed back the freedom of painting.

He brought unusual, powerful colour into his sculptural pieces, to the point that he calls them “three-dimensional paintings.”

Hans says he “makes a game” of combining high art with street art, of mixing the exclusive with the ordinary. He crafts with a natural, impish intent to equalise. “I’m in the middle of things. I love both worlds.” One of his favourite pieces is a three-metre high sculpture of Eve. The image is drawn from revered renaissance paintings of the first woman on earth, but this Eve is a big black woman with chunks of gold jewellery, a glittering R&B Goddess covered in bling.

His preposterous chandeliers wittily dismantle the social divide. “Chandeliers,” he says, “are usually symbols of status and richness. But I wanted to trigger questions about other worlds.”

Iridescent glass is sculpted in the shape of an almighty penis. Another glass shower takes the shape of an atomic bomb.

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But Hans’ “game” is far from whimsical. It relies on a steady, hungry devotion to the acquisition of skill. He learned his glass art in a remote mountain village in the Czech Republic that houses four hundred glass workshops. He returns there frequently to absorb more centuries-old ways of working with glass; working side by side with unknown artists who “make beautiful pieces, but never go to see the art world.”

The seriousness of Hans’ “game” is patent in his absorption with detail. He says, “I go far with detail. I don’t leave any pieces to chance. I make sure it’s worked out perfectly.” Even in the execution of his art, Hans has another division to bridge. The “white collar” artist in him gets the idea. Once it is born, he says, “there is no going back. Once you see it, you can’t make less.” The “blue collar” artist in him takes over and has to make it work, no matter how difficult.

Hans says the Dutch Embassy sculpture is more difficult than he thought. It incorporates everything that he has learned so far and, though not the biggest, occupies the greatest stretch of façade he has covered to date. The sculptures are finished in clay, “they have that beautiful, brown, wet quality”. They will be cut into pieces, hollowed out and dried. Hans will add colour, using, among other techniques, an ancient Spanish technique called “Majolica”. Once the pieces are glazed and fired, he paints on pigment and then fires them again. This way, the paint is burnt in.

The colours will stay forever.”

Hans’s art does more than merge subcultures and times. It links us to dimensions beyond the earth.

In the embassy sculpture, body parts with wings augur the unseen. An enormous space shoe cues the time “when we will set foot on other planets.”

Hans is a kind of upbeat guide, combining surprise with ancient archetypes, melding seeming rebellion into a sense of blessing, creating pieces he says, “that get you wondering, like me, about the beauty and the possibilities of this world.”

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If the phrase “Art Hotel� makes you think of open white spaces with brightly coloured contemporary paintings and carefully placed Ming vases, the Cape Francolin in Riebeek Kasteel, north of Cape Town, might catch you off guard.

Here David and Clive Bellamy present their eclectic mix of rustic farmhouse, offbeat concepts and serious art as a living installation, in a seemingly conflicting combination of ideas, not unlike mixing business and pleasure.

Two years ago, having completed a degree in Fine Arts at the famed Central St. Martins College of Art in London, David returned to South Africa and with the help of his dog Clive – a connoisseur from Grassy Park - embarked on turning this dilapidated farmhouse into a patiently progressing work of art.

Inside the Cape Francolin, an eclectic mix of cosy farmhouse interior and arbitrary clutter result in a friendly space with quirky undertones: In the bedrooms, crisp white Irish linen starkly contrasts David’s curious arrangement of antiques and found objects; a simple coat of red ‘stoep paint’ turns two old cabinets into elegant bedside tables; graphic black and white photography is comfortably juxtaposed with brightly coloured, naive drawings.

Iron is one of the hotels major themes, with a palette of black and rusted iron prevailing inside the house. In the overgrown garden, forged and wrought iron objects trouvaille, pieces of rusty farmyard machinery, salvaged spiral burglar bars and newly made wrought iron arabesques used as architectural decorative elements, come together in a gothic celebration of metal - a ritual that has even infiltrated some of the village’s most trend-setting establishments.

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The hotel also acts as a kind of three-dimensional catalogue, with furniture and artworks for sale, scattered throughout the property. The lounge and three homely bedrooms are filled with works commissioned by local artists – from bathroom fittings to a series of unusual lights. New additions include the “Dappled Light” – spots of blurry blue light inside a sandblasted glass jar and “Constellation” - an arrangement of thorny twigs bejewelled with tiny bulbs that turn into a remarkably realistic constellation at night, both by local artist Gareth Russell.

‘South African identity conservation’ is another of the hotel’s major themes. According to David too many South Africans commit ‘identity suicide’, especially in architecture, where local vernacular is often ignored in favour of more ‘exotic’ styles such as Tuscan and French Provençal.

The Cape Francolin’s South African identity is apparent in detail throughout the hotel - from the gable of the pool inspired by the Oude Kerk in Tulbagh to the seven course menu of the monthly Emerald Dover supper club, where a contemporary spin on the old-fashioned recipes of the enigmatic C. Louis Leipoldt result in such exquisite combinations as white grape, almond and garlic soup, salad of yellowtail with batterfried wild fennel, Karoo lamb steak with wild rosemary, and slap hakskeentjies and new season fig jam brûleé.

Turning everyday things into eccentric melodrama is another of the Cape Francolin’s many joys. A part of the old barn is turned into the romantic “Stoep d’Amour” with comfortable art deco sofas, heart-shaped fairy lights and a Frida Kahlo portrait eavesdropping on intimate conversation between guests. On typically scorching Swartland days guests can rejuvenate themselves in “The Pool of Tranquility” or enjoy afternoon tea served in “Cups of Happiness”. Pieces of rusty wire bent to shape words become “Poetry” and in the backyard, an arrangement of antique chairs baking in the sun is reminiscent of the stage set-up for an avant-garde theatre production. In a cool corner of the garden, underneath the overhanging leaves of a mulberry bush, an art deco sofa upholstered in leaf-patterned English Chintz becomes “Camouflaged Furniture.”

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18 But apart from tongue-in-cheek theatrics and intriguing installations, the hotel is also a place where artists can create as well as showcase their work - the dynamics of which is yet another stage in the Cape Francolin’s constant evolution. Exhibitions have included works by local artists such as Tracey Derrick and Andrew Lord, while the hotel’s permanent collection, includes work by internationally famed artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Damien Hirst and Jean Cocteau.

The current artist in residence is Brit, Louise Kaye, who is working on a mixed media exhibition planned for the beginning of May. Entitled “Room for change”, the work includes large wire cocoons as well as gouache and charcoal drawings influenced by typical English floral fabrics and wild acacia thorns. Further into the future David plans a collaborative ‘sunshine’ exhibition to coincide with summer solstice, in a collection of artwork that involves the sun and it’s processes.

It is rare that a person has complete control of his immediate surroundings and this is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Cape Francolin: every detail – from arbitrary found-object-clutter to the careful selection of serious art – is the result of one person. This is essential to the establishment of the property as a living work of art.

Like the Swartland heat that demands slowing down, the Cape Francolin in its entirety is a complex composition that demands time to be spent looking, investigating and noticing detail.

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the unwavering gaze

By Liana Turner

Hoovering up the cobwebs from the skeletons of art and honing the blade of Durban culture to a razor-sharp edge, Red Eye Art unleashes an unprecedented onslaught of youthful creative energy.

In the great Victorian auditorium of the Durban City Hall, the grainy animations of foremost South African artist William Kentridge flicker onscreen to a haunting Philip Miller soundtrack played live by the Sontonga quartet. In the foyer, a photographic installation from artist Tamlyn Martin scrolls silently through. Outside in the breezy night, the burlesque Supergroup tunes up for its darkly energetic gospel gig, watched with sightless eyes by the gaudy fibreglass cows of the Cow Parade project.

20 Seven years and more than fifty events ago, a small group of creative, like-minded individuals held a meeting. What transpired after this collaboration was to later become the mainstay of the Durban art scene, a chain reaction of frantic planning, financial juggling and more than a few last-minute scrambles that took Red Eye Art from concept to reality and made this incredible event what it is today.

Red Eye Art was launched in May 1998 at the Durban Art Gallery and to this day attracts large numbers of people with its eclectic mix of contemporary art, music, fashion, dance, performance and design. The inspiration for the event came about during 1997 when director of the Durban Art Gallery, Carol Brown, returned from a trip to the USA where she had visited over 50 museums and galleries. She discovered that one of the major problems facing museums was their inability to appeal to the 18 to 39 year old age group of the population and that many of these institutions had begun to host events such as cocktail parties and special previews in an attempt to entice this particular target market.

Upon her return, the realisation that a similar problem existed in South Africa and the fact that many people still regarded galleries as elitist, artistic institutions, resulted in a meeting between various people of a similar ages who were either involved in the local arts scene or had previously expressed interest in the gallery’s activities.

Some serious brainstorming ensued and due to the varying disciplines and backgrounds of the people involved, a consensus was reached to host a multi-media event that incorporated as many aspects of the visual and performing arts as possible. The duration of the event was initially kept to two hours only on the first Friday of every month, with permanent or current exhibitions being left in place and the performers and artists working around or interacting within the spaces. It was this exclusive, once-off appeal that led to the coining of the phrase ‘a One Night Stand with Art’. The original format of hosting the event monthly has since fallen away due to the increasingly difficult task of sourcing new or original material on such a regular basis and a larger event now takes place quarterly.

The inspiration for the name ‘Red Eye Art’ was derived from the term used to describe the late night flights in the States, suggesting the glamorous, jet-setting lifestyle of the ‘young and the fabulous’.

As one of Durban’s ‘Proudly South African’ initiatives, Red Eye has succeeded in providing an important platform for young, up-and-coming artists, musicians and designers to showcase their work and prove to South Africa (and the rest of the world) that they are more than capable of producing work of an international standard. The event has played host to some of the country’s more famous (and infamous) artists alike. SA export band to the States, Seether (formerly Sarongas), Boo!, Landscape Prayers, fashion divas Amanda Laird-Cherry, Craig Native, Colleen Eitzen and Tumi Mothlamare, controversial performance artists Steven Cohen (FNB Vita Award winner 1998), Brett Bailey and Beezy Bailey, Wayne Barker, visual artists Thando Mama and Langa Magwa are just some of the many artists who have featured in the past.

And for any undiscovered talent still aspiring to become known, the Red Eye functions to provide the initial impetus that many artists need but cannot find elsewhere.

Red Eye Art serves to educate the public and generate interest and awareness of the arts as a whole and although each event lasts only an evening, it is not merely about the ‘here and the now’ - one of the fundamental long term goals is to establish an enthusiastic art viewing public while simultaneously raising funds to purchase artworks for the city of Durban by local artists. As a cultural institution in one of the most vibrant, colourful and culturally rich cities in South Africa, the Durban Art Gallery aims to be truly representative of the country’s diverse population and Red Eye Art reflects this by pumping the lifeblood of culture back into the city streets and uniting its citizens under the banner of art.

For more information visit www.redeyeart.co.za or call Durban Art Gallery 031 311 2268.

‘dark room’ by jan turnbull, photographer

Tom started taking pictures when he was 12, setting up his own dark room to process black and white prints. “My first camera was a gift that I received for subscribing to Time magazine. It was one of those cheap, plastic ones, but it did the job!” At 15 he started assisting photographers in Cape Town to gain as much experience as he could and at 18, took the leap and went independent. And in the seven years since, he has come a long way.

“I have always had a passion for photography and am constantly thinking of new ideas for projects. Having never had any formal education in photography as such, the interest started early and has remained so constant that it must be what is called a natural aptitude. It does help that I have an active imagination, even if it does keep me awake at night.” Although Tom prefers to work with film, he is adept in both digital and film, shooting in high-end digital format for commercial work and leaving film for his personal work. His preferred subject matter is that of conceptual photographic portraits and incorporating people into landscape settings, however he is no amateur when it comes to more commercial work and he has won various awards for his work on advertising campaigns, such as the Vigilietti ad campaign (2004).

Tom’s love of creative conceptual work is clearly highlighted in his first solo exhibition, entitled ‘Feature’, which is currently running at Café du Sud and is opening in Johannesburg later in the year. In a series of 12 images printed in 450 x 600mm format, Tom uses portraits of film stars contained within television screens – the medium from which they are recognised – to make use of a subtle, almost noirish humour to displace the familiar faces into different contexts.

the new noir

Capetonian-born 25 year-old Tom Buchanan oozes creativity and passion. As we languish in the sun over cappuccinos at Sundance Café, chatting about his life, love and inspirations, I have a sudden yearning to pick up a camera and take a shot… of anything. His passion and enthusiasm are infectious and this is clearly evident in his work.

tom buchanan

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“Landscapes of all sorts – urban, rural, industrial – interest me, but no less so does portraiture.

The exhibition combines the two, but instead of including portraits of figures you might expect to meet in those landscapes, I introduced the very familiar but impersonal and totally disconnected faces of film stars – beaming them in as it were by dropping a TV screen into the scene.

“I carried the television around the country to find locations and present the film star in a situation that is foreign to them but familiar to the viewer. There is a touch of humour in the shots, which in my work, or the work of others for the matter, be it literature, film or painting, I prefer to any laboured attempt at profundity.

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“On the one hand they are out of context, on the other hand it asks whether they are ever in context. But, in truth, as always in the visual arts, the visual idea comes first and the words to explain it have to be found afterwards.”

Tom is currently working on material for his next exhibition, which is scheduled to be held in April at the Winchester Mansions in Cape Town and he has plans to direct a couple of short films. And if ‘Feature’ is anything to go by, Tom Buchanan is a name that we will be hearing more often.

Watch this space!

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eline keller-sørensen

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eline keller-sørensen Educated as a photographer in Hamburg, German-Danish photographer Eline Keller-Sørensen has been living in Cape Town since 2004, working as a freelance assistant and photographer.

Her latest body of work ‘Carpixis’ is a collection of images of classic cars and various things related to automobiles that have crossed her path over the last eight years. The photographs have been put together to form a 24-page mini-book consisting of 10cm x 10cm-sized images, which is presented in a black linen coated box. There have been 7 editions thus far, with a promise of more to come…

“My passion for cars dates back to when I was four years old and the only thing I really wanted for my birthday was a toy car park to play with my huge collection of Matchbox cars. Luckily I got it and when I picked up a camera years later and started to take pictures, my major focus became cars. Ever since then it has been a constant part of my photographic portfolio.”

For Eline it has become a kind of obsession to find rare special cars that catch her eye among the rather homogenic egg-shaped designed ‘power machines’ that are found on the roads today.

What is important, she says, is the individual character of the car and the small details that can be found in such uniquely designed automobiles. And it is these that she attempts to convey in her photographs.

“The love that has been invested in these cars usually carries on from the designer to the producer and finally the buyer and owner.

There is an interesting metaphor between old and classic design detail, which once was eschewed to be in line with personality and the representation of individualism. As Henry Ford once said to his production teams for the Model T Ford, ‘you can have any colour you want as long as it’s black.’ The art here is to capture the exception and details unique to certain models.”

While Eline captures the true essence of classic automobiles on film, she is not interested in owning one. “I like to look at them, touch them, drive them and put them in scene, but I see it as being a bit like a relationship - you meet and separate again after a small exchange of interest. Maybe one day I’ll meet the car of my dreams that I won’t be able to resist…you just never know.”

An exhibition with large format images is on the cards for Eline in the future, as well as the sale of her mini-books, which will soon be available for purchase on www.carpixis.com.

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globe by hermann kl端mp, explorer

a rising pho enix

rotterdam

Emerging from the ashes of World War II with new-age architecture, firstclass cultural attractions and a sparkling nightlife, Rotterdam is a breath of fresh air. By Mia Russell

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Situated at the heart of a maze of rivers and artificial waterways that together form the outlet of the rivers Rijn (Rhine) and Maas (Meuse) lies Rotterdam, a cosmopolitan city famous for its rich culture and avant-garde architecture. After devastating damage during World War II, Rotterdam has risen from the ashes, with an amalgamation of ambitious new-age architecture and first-class cultural attractions, growing into a vibrant, forceful city. This redevelopment hasn’t, however, obliterated the city’s earthy character - its tough grittiness is part of its appeal and the self-image of this multicultural metropolis is that of a no-nonsense workers’ city.

History Like Amsterdam, Rotterdam’s name is taken from a river - in this case the Rotte, which empties into the Maas at this point. The city’s birth extends back to the 10th century, when, despite constant threat from the sea, a small group of early Rotterdammers settled on the Rotte banks along a small stream running through the boggy, peaty area. The settlement flourished, but it was not until the Golden Age (1550-1650), when Holland was a world power, that the city became a centre of trade, home to both the United East India Company and the West India Company.

Rotterdam’s importance as a city has always been determined by its river-bound location. When one thinks of Rotterdam, one immediately thinks of the vast harbour and seaport that the city is famous for and although it has only recently relinquished the title of having the world’s largest port to Singapore, Rotterdam still has the seventh largest port in the world and is the largest in Europe.

The architectural capital of Europe Rotterdam attracts a great deal of international interest as a city of architecture and has become home to many architecture firms and design museums, some of which are considered the most progressive in the world. A few square kilometres of the city centre offers a complete overview of what the twentieth century has produced in terms of modern architecture and as one proceeds through the city, the different architectural movements of the last 50 years are easily distinguishable. Appealing examples of pre-war architecture are evident in works such as the Van Nelle Factory, the Witte Huis (White House) and the Schouwburgplein, while the innovative and adventurous period after the war is expressed in structures such as the Kobuswoningen (Cube houses), the Kunsthal, the Luxor Theatre and the Erasmus Bridge.

Designed by Brinkman & Van der Vlugt, the Van Nelle Factory (1925–1931) is one of the most remarkable examples of Dutch functionalism in Rotterdam and is an international milestone in the development of modern architecture. The concept of light, air and space pervades the entire complex, originally designed for the comfort of its employees and the cladding has been described as “one of the best examples of a fully developed curtain-wall system.” Once a packaging plant for coffee, tea and tobacco, the Van Nelle Factory serves as a continuing inspiration to contemporary Dutch architects and is commonly considered an example of the Nieuwe Bouwen (New Building), a Dutch modernist movement. Recently renovated, it has now been reopened as the Van Nelle Design Factory.

Rotterdam’s post-war design saw a distinct move towards more experimentation and the Kobuswoningen are the best example of this. Designed by Piet Blom, the Kobuswoningen (cube houses) could be called an architectonic experiment, in which Blom considered form, aesthetics and spatial effects of greater importance than functionality and practical purpose. Blom’s idea was to create a kind of village within a town, a safe oasis where several functions could take place. The concept behind these houses is that he tries to create a forest, with each cube representing an abstract tree; therefore the whole village becomes a forest.

Near the cube houses is a docking area in the oldest harbour of Rotterdam, the popular Oude (Old) Haven, where historic vessels were brought for repairs or reconstruction.

The wide-open public walking and sitting area is filled with sidewalk cafés, restaurants, and outdoor concerts make this a lively spot. A short walk along the terraces will bring you to the Witte Huis (White House), which was once Holland’s only ‘skyscraper’.

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40 The Witte Huis is something of an architectural landmark in Europe. It was the continent’s first skyscraper, built in 1898 for a pair of Rotterdam businessmen, eager to show off their wealth. They commissioned ‘a grand office building in the American spirit’ and the result was an 11-story, 45m structure in the French château style. Resting on 900 pilings driven into the ground, it was the tallest building in Europe at the time of its completion. It was also one of the few buildings in central Rotterdam to survive the German bombing campaigns of World War II. Unlike American skyscrapers, which rely on a steel frame to support its stonework, this building’s load is borne by two thick interior walls perpendicular to four other lighter walls. However, steel is still used to hold the facade in place and to brace the floors. Today, Rotterdam has the two tallest buildings in the Netherlands, Montevideo, which stands at 152 m (residential) and Delftse Poort at 151 m.

Wide open spaces Answering the need for open space within the city centre, the Schouwburgplein is situated in the heart of the metropolis, flanked by the City Theatre and the City Concert Hall and surrounded by shops.

Emphasising the importance of a void, which opens up a panorama towards the city skyline, the square is designed as an interactive public space and is flexible in use, changing according to days and seasons. Its appearance is a reflection of the Port of Rotterdam and one of the major features of the square are the four hydraulic lighting elements that can be interactively altered by the inhabitants of the city.

Symbolic Icons Rotterdam’s Erasmus Bridge is to the city what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris and the Empire State Building to New York. This cable-stay bridge links the northern and southern halves of the city with a 792mspan in spectacular style. Nicknamed ‘The Swan’ because of its graceful posture over the water, the bridge deck is supported by steel cables slung over a pylon that is bent to counter the forces of tension, while traffic passes serenely beneath. The Erasmus Bridge is such a dramatic departure in bridge building that it has become part of the city’s official logo and was officially opened

by Queen Beatrix in September 1996. Another symbol of the city is the Euromast Space Tower, which at 184m tall, is the highest lookout tower in the Netherlands. When it was built in 1960 in honour of the international garden festival, the Floriade, it rose 104 meters above the city and its industrious port.

During the 10 years after its construction, other buildings were built in attempt to surpass the height of the tower, however by 1970, the Euromast still rose higher. A space tower was then set atop its mighty shoulders, bringing the Euromast to its current impressive height of 185m.

41 Culture Hailed as the European Culture Capital of 2001, Rotterdam is currently going through somewhat of a renaissance, with some moderately successful urban renewal projects featuring ambitious architecture, an increasingly sparkling nightlife and a host of summer festivals celebrating the city’s multicultural population and identity, such as the Caribbean-inspired ‘Summer Carnival’, the Dance Parade and the Metropolis Popfestival.

The 2nd International Architecture Biennale was held in the city last year, with a theme that focused on the relationship between water and architecture in the Netherlands and around the world and achieved great success. The self-styled festival city of the Netherlands also hosts an International Film Festival in January, a poetry festival in June and the Valery Gergiev Festival in September, making it a real event city and creating healthy competition with Amsterdam, which is often viewed as the ‘cultural’ capital of the Netherlands. Rotterdam has almost 30 museums – each exhibiting a unique perspective on the many facets of art and architecture the city has to offer. The Museumpark combines five museums dedicated to art and architecture, including such internationally renowned museums as the Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Kunsthal. Staging some 25 exhibitions a year, the Kunsthal presents culture in the widest sense of the word: old art, new art, design, photography - from elitist to popular. Designed by architect Rem Koolhaas, the museum has over 3 300 square metres of exhibition space and frequently experiments with themes, resulting in an exciting and varied exhibition repertoire highlighting Impressionism, lingerie, Leonardo da Vinci, Blackfoot Indians, jewels of the Orient, Pop Art. Other interesting museums include the Nederlands Foto Instituut (photography) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi). More than a museum of architecture, the NAi is a cultural institute that is open to the public and uses a variety of methods for communicating about the shaping of human space.

Host to Europe’s largest port and a hub of the Dutch economy, Rotterdam is no longer content to play second fiddle to Amsterdam. The recent rejuvenation of its city centre and the ambitious amalgamation of pre- and post-war architectural styles have ensured that the city is fast-becoming the design destination of choice.

plans by studiomas, architects

the rebirth of jozi

Johannesburg is turning its “bad” buildings into “better” buildings, and in the process is slowly improving the quality of life for its residents and boosting property values. Lucille Davie goes downtown.

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Like any large city, Johannesburg has gone through ups and downs in the fortunes of its inner city buildings. Statistics indicate that there are approximately 1 000 “bad” buildings in the inner city suburbs and in a new collaborative project more of these buildings are being targeted for refurbishment. Bad buildings are ones where the amount of arrears owed in rates exceeds the market value of the building. A bad building comes about when the building is “invaded” by slum landlords and tenants, becoming overcrowded and rapidly deteriorating when its amenities cannot cope with the demands placed on it. The owner often absconds when these conditions become overwhelming, leaving huge amounts of unpaid rates owed to the City and tenants living in unhealthy conditions.

An innovative programme of rejuvenation of these residential buildings in high-density areas like Hillbrow, Berea, Joubert Park and the CBD began in 2001. The City moved in on bad buildings, in cases expropriating them, in drastic cases demolishing them, and then offering them to investors to refurbish and pay the outstanding rates. But it became unwieldy and long-winded, with screening of potential tenants and their suggested rehabilitation plans acquiring the building from the defaulting owner and transferring it to the new owner (with possible court action by the old owner), a time-consuming and costly process.

The eviction of illegal occupants was also a lengthy process. By the beginning of 2005 only around 19 buildings were in the throes of eviction and refurbishment. Now the programme will shift its focus - it will extend to the east of the city, to areas like the Greater Ellis Park Precinct and smaller, freestanding buildings and houses, in a “broader, more general approach”. Through a number of “project packages”, it is hoped that over a three-year period up to 1 000 buildings will be refurbished. The programme is managed by the Johannesburg Property Company (JPC) and was conceived by the economic development unit in conjunction with the Johannesburg Development Agency and JPC. There are several hundred bad buildings in the inner city. But there are also a number of buildings that can be classified as “not so bad” or even “good” that have accrued large debts with the City.

Since April 2003, 94 buildings have been placed in the Better Buildings Programme, with 19 refurbished so far and 48 expropriated and acquired by new investors. To date, the value of refurbishments stands at R320-million, with R260-million in rates write-offs granted, according to the department of economic development, tourism and marketing. It is hoped that this process will encourage a “ripple effect” of “increased investor confidence” in the inner city. And it seems to be working: there are an estimated additional 100 buildings being renovated without intervention from the Better Buildings Programme, says the department.

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The new project encompasses five main thrusts to kick the programme up to a higher level: the continuation of the existing programme; a database intervention project; a liquidations and auctions project; a revenue deals project; and a sectional title pilot project (STPP). With the continuation of the existing programme, the new owner is obliged to sign an obligations agreement with the JPC. This is a five-year agreement to ensure “ongoing good quality development and management” of the building, involving a due diligence report of each new owner, as well as requiring the investor to tender for the building, submitting BEE and rehabilitation plans, among others. In the Database Intervention Project, slumlord owners who are operating overcrowded and rundown buildings, even where the rates and service payments are being paid, are being identified and urged to rehabilitate their buildings and bring them under proper management. If they prove to be obstinate, a “naming and shaming” strategy will be considered.

The liquidations and auctions project envisages speeding up the refurbishment process by allowing more writeoffs in exchange for fast-tracking refurbishments. This already happens informally but the new Better Buildings Programme will encourage more of these projects while still in the liquidation and auction stage. The next project, Revenue Deals, is similar to the previous project but occurs at a less advanced stage. Here the owner or prospective owner can pre-empt liquidation and auction by entering into an obligations agreement with the City and begin the refurbishment process sooner.

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The STPP, managed by the economic development unit, involves the rehabilitation of buildings owned under sectional title. Once again, the debt owed to the City will be used to “gain control� of the building. A certain amount of write-off of the debt will be allowed in exchange for upgrading and managing the building through the establishment of well-run bodies corporate.

Under the original Better Buildings Programme, these buildings were offered to new investors and expropriated, but the process is proving to be difficult, with owner resistance or costly compensation claims. The STPP will review each case and instead of a judicial administrator taking charge of a building, obligations agreements will be signed with individual owners and bodies corporate, to begin refurbishment of the building, to be carefully monitored by the JPC. The new programme is reliant on a closer working relationship between the JPC and the revenue department, City Power, Joburg Water and Pikitup, the agencies and utilities that are owed monies in rates and services. Estimated costs of the improved programme come to R49.17million over the three-year period. This includes specialist legal, management and revenue staff, security, cleaning, expropriation and demolition costs.

It is estimated that initial benefits indicate that writing off about R660-million over three years could probably unlock some R1.1-billion in investment in the inner city.

This takes into account declining write-offs over time, as well as declining levels of investment per building over the period. Social benefits, like an improved quality of life for tenants and property owners, will also be seen. Increased property prices and rentals will be another spin-off, and the City will benefit from collecting rates from well-run buildings.

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holcim awards for sustainable construction Formed in 2003 and based in Zurich, Switzerland, the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction is an organisation, which is committed to reinforcing public awareness of the enormous importance that architecture, engineering and construction have in achieving a sounder and more sustainable environment and future.

The mission of the Holcim Foundation is to select and support initiatives that combine sustainable construction solutions with architectural quality and enhanced quality of life beyond technical solutions, as well as to encourage sustainable responses to the technological, environmental, socio-economic and cultural issues affecting building and construction. With the objective being the non-commercial promotion and development of sustainable construction on both a regional and global scale, the Holcim Foundation utilises the global reach of the Holcim Group to accelerate progress toward sustainable construction, encouraging initiatives in support of sustainable approaches to the provision of housing and infrastructure in industrialising and industrialised nations alike.

Last year saw the first global Holcim Awards competition for sustainable construction projects, which were created to encourage architects, urban designers and students to pursue environmentally friendly and sustainable building solutions. Operating in partnership with various educational institutions and universities around the world, the main aim of these awards is to unite the multiplicity of competencies that are globally available in the construction sector around a heightened awareness of their critical role in sustainability: diffusing best practice, pioneering fresh solutions and inspiring young architects, engineers developers to adopt new and sustainable parameters for all they build.

In the first phase of the Holcim Awards, which is made up of regional competitions, South Africa took the silver and bronze accolades for their innovative designs.

caravan site upgrade, nieuwoudtville, south africa Type of project: Public utilities Architect/Design team: Andy Horn, Flavio Tedeschi and Anne Marie Moore (architects); Eco Design (architects and consultants).

Applying a well-considered balance between a selection of locally available materials and construction technology, this project took a systematic approach to addressing the target issues in a noninvasive manner, whilst still respecting the context in which it is situated. Straw bale walls, timber structure and sod-roofing were used as key elements – and new technologies that optimise renewable energy – vacuum-tube collectors for solar water heating, as well as PV for low-level appliances and lighting.

Another significant aspect of this design was the use of composting toilets rather than water-based sewage, thereby providing an opportunity to recycle grey water following its preliminary treatment through a constructed wetland.

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Tsoga Environmental Centre & Local Sustainability Catalyst, Cape Town, South Africa Type of project: Environmental resource and education centre Architect/Design team: An ARG design project designed by Anna Cowen Architects and Vernon Collis and Associates with landscape design by Tarna Klitzner.

bronze 2005

The main aim of this project was to create a vision of community selfsufficiency and most notable was the effort to catalyse sustainable livelihood in the region. The project is also significant in that it promotes the creation of new jobs and skills transfer throughout the local population, thereby empowering the community’s decisionmaking capacities to improve the quality of life. Indigenous materials, as well as strategies for addressing passive thermal control and day lighting, yielded a design that can be constructed, operated and maintained by the community with minimal external and technical interventions. Provisions for water conservation waste facilitation, as well as rainwater harvesting were among other outstanding achievements of the scheme.

48 Following five regional competitions, 15 award-winning projects, which include the two South African silver and bronze winners, will now compete in the first global Holcim Awards competition for sustainable construction projects, which is to be held in Bangkok in April this year. The global phase of the competition showcases the best entries from more than 1500 submissions from 118 countries, including South Africa’s two winning entries and encourages innovative, future-oriented and tangible approaches within the building and construction industry. Other countries with exceptional designs included Canada’s design for material reduction in the form of efficient fabric-formed concrete, which presents a technique using fabrics instead of rigid moulds for the production of concrete elements; Japan’s urban housing renovation project which uses the creation of an ‘air suit’ to improve economic and ecological performance and Venezuela’s social improvement project for the shanty towns of the city.

A diversity of approaches to sustainable construction provides an opportunity to learn from innovation and celebrate new solutions. The Holcim Foundation aims to do just that by awarding innovative, future-oriented and tangible sustainable construction projects from around the globe and to expand on the idea that sustainability should form an essential part of the built environment of the future. In the following issue we take a closer look at the results of the Holcim Awards – we go onto site with both projects, cover community-related workshops and track development of both projects until their completion at the end of 2006.

For more information on the Holcim Foundation and the Holcim Awards, visit www.holcimfoundation.org Special thanks for the support from the teams at the Holcim Foundation, ARG Design, ECO Design and Specilink for their participation and making this article possible.

For any enquiries and participation requests regarding ecological construction related information, workshops, community development and product or services related issues pertaining to green eco development, please contact Eugene Nortje on 072 857 6607 or koelte@yahoo.com.

mannequin by ali adam, fashion designer

an w s a f o the grace Award-winning fashion up-and-comer Katherine Mortner is the hottest new kid on the block. Leigh van den Berg chats to her about her obsession with skinny-leg jeans, a quirky little swan print and her most recent runway success.

Speaking of her most recent win, Katherine describes the experience as being ‘amazing’ and claims to have been totally taken by surprise. “I know everyone always says it comes out the blue, but it really did,” she says. Coming out tops over nine other contestants, Katherine’s winning collection was simply titled Big and Small, a theme reflected in her use of black swans in varying sizes, which she had printed onto custom bleached, pale blue denim. The swan print isn’t hers, however, but rather something she picked up while cruising for fabric at The Oriental Plaza.

“I thought it was the one of the most beautiful designs I’d ever seen,” she says, telling me that she simply became ‘obsessed’ with it. “I tend to go through these phases where I become completely inspired by something and just have to use it to its full capacity.”

As part of her prize, Katherine enjoyed a whirlwind trip to Paris, Tunisia and Milan where she attended a La Perla fashion show, toured the Lee Cooper factory and bankrupted herself in the shops. And what are the trendy set in Europe wearing this season? “Lots of skinny-leg jeans and stripes!” she says. “I brought them home in bulk.”

When I ask Katherine to describe her signature style, she’s hesitant, not wanting to put her look in a box. “Ooh, now you’ve put me on the spot…” she stalls. “Quirky?” I encourage. “No! Oh no, no! I absolutely hate that word!” she shrieks, but later admits that it might be right, considering a lot of other people have used it describe her work. “I see my designs as being quite pretty and girly, but in a simple way.

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photographer peter gillat, courtesy of iFashion www.ifashion.co.za

A graduate of Johannesburg’s prestigious London Institute of Fashion (LISOF), Katherine Mortner has had a love of fashion and clothing since her teens, often altering her own wardrobe to shake it up or make it fit. Now, it’s clear her high school passion has paid off, as she has just won the 2005 Lee Cooper/Elle New Talent Competition, a contest that traditionally opens SA Fashion Week and has helped launch the careers of designers like Nkhensani Maganyi of Stoned Cherrie. She also took first place in the Woolworths RE jeans competition back in 2004, although she’s far too modest to admit it. In fact, I’m only aware of it thanks to Google.

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I usually focus more on the fabric rather than the design itself and aim to make stuff that really, really fits,” she says. “I strongly believe that no matter what you’re wearing, as long as it fits you perfectly, you’ll look far better than if you’re wearing something incredibly beautiful but illfitting.” Inspired by designers like Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel and Marc Jacobs, Katherine is out to dress ‘a girl who wants to look feminine but with a bit of an edge.’ It’s important to her, however, that this edge is somewhat understated. “She doesn’t want to be gawked at. It’s not like, ‘here I am, look at me, I’m so quirky, oh so funky’,” she laughs, using her two least favourite words.

Right now, however, Katherine is working for Guess in Johannesburg. “My official job title is Kids Merchandiser and Denim Designer,” she says. “Basically, I ensure that the styles that are being produced are done properly. It’s sort of a selection process and then I choose the washes, trims and buttons and make sure that when its produced it’s all what it’s supposed to be. I’m loving it.”

As far as her future plans go, Katherine refuses to make any. “I never plan ahead, so I don’t really know where I’m going to be at any point in my life,” she says. “I’m just happy to be where I am right now, but as far as my labels concerned, as part of the prize of the Elle New Talent competition, I have to show a new collection at the end of the next July, so I really have to have something sorted out by then.”

She’s already decided on the name, Swaan, as she believes most people will remember her as ‘swan girl’ from last year’s look, so she might as well use it.

From skinny jeans to swans, Katherine Mortner is a name that is sure to reverberate around fashion circles in the future and if her latest collection is anything to go by, the future looks bright. Katherine’s own label, Swaan, is still under construction, but once it’s up and running she’s hoping to sell it via The Space as well as ‘whoever else will have it.’

model: Ferial Nigem / photographer: Jan Turnbull / stylist: Amelia Burger

chair by yelda bayratar/cafe de süd, passionate about 50’s and 60’s furniture

filling

up w ith ro cketf uel

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tion a nd an appe in the tite fo drive r the r ’s se extre at, Ro me. b Gre y.

n, ins pira

the m an

with

red b y pas sio is

hits t he tra ck

fuel is powe

Merv Jenna

Rocke t n bra nd egrow Hom

Do you live for the thrill of jumping out of aeroplanes, dream of launching the muddy wheels of your bike off the edge of an almost vertical downhill track? Is it the grind of sand on skin as you dive along the beach, hands cupped for that perfect volley that turns you on? Do you crave the deafening purr of an engine rocketing down the track, as you change gear and hit the accelerator?

Yes? Then I probably won’t need to introduce you to Rocketfuel – homegrown brand of the X-game lifestyle that specialises in product, fashion and furniture design.

The origins of Rocketfuel are bound to economics. Rob Grey was retrenched - for the second time. His tank was empty; he’d come to a complete standstill on the mechanical engineering freeway that had carried his career to places like Germany, Hong Kong, Chile, Vietnam, England and South Africa. Rob Grey, however, was about to take off.

“The most powerful day I ever experienced was the day I woke up after losing everything. On the floor, sleeping on a mattress, renting a room in someone’s apartment. I woke up hearing the birds, smelling the flowers and my senses started kicking in and all of a sudden I realised I couldn’t go anywhere else. Nothing more could be taken from me.

Whatever I chose to do, I could do it. When you hit zero you can do anything you want to do.”

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‘Anything’ involved branding his personality, calling it Rocketfuel and selling it in the form of product designs, initially, and later a fashion label and furniture. ‘Anything’ rapidly became something very big.

“Probably one of my biggest attributes is my passion. Everything is run on rocketfuel. Everything I do I get caught up in. I live for it. I just looked at how I would describe my personality and in doing that sell a product.”

It is difficult to talk about Rocketfuel without becoming swamped in brand ‘speak’. It is a textbook example of how branding should be done and what a serious brand is really all about. First of all there is the clarity of vision. The inspiration. For Grey, this is the freestyle, tribal lifestyle associated with team sports. “People want to belong to a tribe as opposed to corporate run of the mill,” he comments. “The brands that they are wearing are giving them an identity.”

“The whole drive behind the brand was to create a culture, a tribe through brand communication.” The Rocketfuel man is an individual with attitude, confidence and drive. And the Rocketfuel woman? “She’s about uniqueness and a funky kind of spunky, got a lot of bang-bang,” Grey adds.

It all comes down to the ‘bang-bang’. Any good marketer can speak brand identity, but it is in living and breathing the identity that it really becomes convincing. For the team at Rocketfuel – that is artistic director Grey and product designer Greg Gilowey– this means buying into the funky-spunky, the uniqueness. Quite literally, to be the brand.

This passion, combined with an acute awareness of design as a commercial transaction makes Rocketfuel work. Factors like the manufacturing process, overseas trends, market price point and order volumes are important considerations in the design development – whether for a shirt or a shifter standing lamp.

“The design is not a pretty picture – it’s how it is made, how it is used. It is the understanding of all these variables that will deliver a successful product. Your design is only successful if it is moving off the rail.”

Evidently, the buy-in of both the team and the clients is working.

Rocketfuel is gaining weight in the product design field through work done for clients such as Audi, Smirnoff, M-web, Shell and Marlboro, to name just a few. The fashion label that hangs on YDE rails has recently fallen into the spotlight with the winning T-shirt design in the Men’s Health Style Challenge. The range of ‘red-hot racing furniture’ is moving the brand into yet another sphere. Grey’s aim is to establish Rocketfuel as a global brand that will be a Prada equivalent of XGames.

“I’m designing and building a global brand and using different products as vehicles to best communicate this brand – sideways and then obviously upwards. I live, eat and sleep the brand. It’s in my veins.”

“I believe everything is possible as opposed to having a wrong and right way. We have a very aggressive, passionate drive when making something happen. It’s as do-able as you believe it is. A lot of heart and soul goes into our designs and they must be worn like that.

Rocketfuel is that kind of energy.”

And for those of you who prefer the games without the ‘X’? Well, after meeting Rob Grey, slipping into a Rocketfuel shirt or settling comfortably onto a leather V8 couch, you might feel the sudden urge to put the ‘X’ back into extreme, fill up with Rocketfuel and get yourself on the racetrack.

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MOJO To most people the arrival of a yet another furniture store in Cape Town might seem redundant, to say the least. But the arrival of a store as honest as Mojo is a godsend. Kobus van der Merwe goes shopping.

It would seem that all it takes to invigorate the often-contrived world of contemporary furniture design, is a little bit of Mojo.It was while practising as an architect and designer in Johannesburg, that Andrew Addison came to realise he was running a business rather than actively designing. A move to Cape Town - taking up a position as luxury yacht interior designer and stylist - prompted his love affair with furniture and an appreciation of local craftsmanship. In his strikingly minimalist Green Point store, aptly named Mojo, Andrew now fathers the creation of fine handcrafted, solid wood furniture. Behind the desk, wood samples suspended from the ceiling resemble the keys of an African marimba. He lovingly strokes each piece, passionately reciting names such as ‘Panga-Panga’ or ‘Padauk’, and more familiar ones like Kiaat and Mahogany.

Mojo’s furniture is crafted from a mix of carefully selected local as well as international woods from sustainable resource programs, manufactured by a team of local craftsmen in a small factory in Epping.

“Cape Town has such a wonderful heritage of superb craftsmanship.

I am passionate about promoting such local talent - from artists to artisans, ” Andrew says. It is clear that he is similarly passionate when it comes to working with wood. “You have to respect that it was once a living thing; use what the wood is giving you something like the grain pattern, for example. That can sometimes provoke the design,” he says.

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The collection of simple and classically shaped pieces on display at Mojo - from cabinets to dining tables - are far removed from the ‘designer’ rip-off’s that consistently flood today’s market.

“When I design a piece for someone, I involve them in the process. I spend time with them to determine their individual needs, both aesthetic and practical. The end-result is a piece that has some of me in it, and a lot of themselves. I despise furniture ‘supermarkets’ which force people to buy furniture as if they were shopping for cleaning products.” That’s why Andrew controls the scale on which Mojo operates - to be able to keep on pouring himself into the pieces he designs.

A eye-catching armchair is on display in a prominent corner of the Green Point showroom. The straight lines of the slightly tilted, floating arms cleverly contrasted by a bolster-shaped back. Its striking simplicity echoes Andrew’s design philosophy.

“Design is not about adding – it’s about knowing when to stop taking away. If you’re not contributing to the integrity of the piece, then don’t do it,” he says. “It’s pointless to design an aesthetically pleasing chair and then try to force comfort on to it. You can’t separate beauty and functionality.” The integrity he speaks of - distinctly visible in his own creations - is certainly what’s most appealing about Mojo’s furniture. Not surprisingly, the armchair is as comfortable as it is cool.

But what is the inspiration behind such pleasing design - a religious devotion to Modernist Architecture and all things minimalist? On the contrary. “I am open to all influences and prefer not to design in a particular style,” Andrew remarks. “‘Styles’ are not real – they were invented to simplify and categorise. A group of people talking about a ‘style’ or a movement doesn’t make it real, or even necessarily important.

As a designer, one has to look at everything with fresh eyes,” he says. That’s what makes Mojo stand out above the rest - its combination of quality, uniqueness and integrity.

“In the end I want people to have something special.

Mojo’s pieces have had lots of ‘hands’ on them - from the design, to the selection of each piece of wood, to the cutting, planning, assembly and finishing. These aren’t simply bits of wood and MDF glued & screwed together to resemble furniture. These pieces have been crafted.”

In a world where we’ve become accustomed to everything being streamlined and automated, it is inevitable that we start dressing the same, driving the same cars and living in similar houses. But at Mojo it’s never a matter of settling for the mundane. Here, originality is predestined.

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vultures by MTKIDU, graphic artist

cutting ed ge design

New kids on the design block, Matt Black are carving a niche with their cutting-edge creativity and graphic design.

Dylan Culhane hits the street with Faith and Mike to check out their latest works.

design inda ba 09

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Faith 47 and Mike Saal of Matt Black are pretty busy for a design studio in its second month of operation, having previously freelanced independently for two years before coming together to form Matt Black. But what’s more impressive than their ability to generate so much work is their ability to do it on their own terms.

Unlike most emerging designers who have to grit their teeth through any number of mind-numbing corporate gigs before they can satiate their own creative aspirations, Matt Black are already working on a number of high profile projects and ensuring that each of these is an artwork unto itself.

They approach what they do with an awareness of working within a commercial industry, but with the skills to sustain the idealism they exude. “We’re open to corporate work,” Faith explains, “provided it’s not just branding or selling another product. The point is to create a space within the commercial industry for work that is personalised and not just churned out.”

Having completed projects with clients like Red Bull, the British Council and the City of Cape Town, the duo is gaining a reputation for fresh, bold work with particular appeal to the youth.

Building on the founders’ existing credentials in the graffiti and illustration scene, Matt Black is also more than just a design studio - it has become a platform for some of Cape Town’s hottest young graphic artists. The company emerged as a response to the need for graffiti and other cutting edge media in the design industry.

obs festival flyer

The team’s populist and indigenous ethos defines their aim in design. “We’re so saturated with American mass media that it can be a battle to

When asked about the ambitions they have for their fledgling company, Mike seems puzzled for a moment then tells me that there hasn’t been a spare second to think about it. They hit the ground running and are still trying to catch their breath. It looks like Matt Black is responding instinctively to the demand for local creative work of substance. Things can only be on the up if you’re talking about expanding the company before the office furniture has all been unpacked.

lack.co.za

“At the end of the day we’re not out to be big. We just want to do the work we’re doing as best we can and be happy with what we’re doing.”

www.mattb

Another work in progress is their entry into the ‘container project’ at the Next Wave Festival in Australia, where selected artists and designers are allocated one of forty massive containers and invited to respond to the theme, ‘Empire Games’. Mike and Faith are teaming up with mak1one and have interpreted the theme by rejecting the empire and returning to the indigenous. “The empire is big and powerful and evil enough. We’re looking at it from a human angle,” says Mike. Using large digitally illustrated canvasses, video installations, working replicas and printed booklets, Matt Black’s container will document and pay tribute to the games of a pre-Nintendo era; games that kids make up on the streets using whatever they can find because they don’t have anything else.

say ‘No! I don’t want that, I want to create something new.’ But as soon as you do that you’ve got something so strong because it’s fresh and relevant and people can relate,” Faith tells me. The impressive body of work they’ve built up testifies to this commitment, and their particular aesthetic is helping to define the elusive Cape Town Style. As Mike puts it, “You can’t come from a place and not have it affect you.”

re:gen fest ival flyer

Drawing from a pool of reputable artists like mak1one, Falko, Senyol and Keti, Mike and Faith work with small teams of illustrators to tackle each project in a unique and personalised way. A recent graffiti production in collaboration with Red Bull involved a 75m x 4m mural executed by 25 artists.

The sprawling masterpiece across the road from a school in Salt River is not only magnificent to behold, it also embeds references to tik awareness in the design. The project was so well received that they’ve already been commissioned for a similar mural in Hout Bay. “There was a conscious effort to affect the community with that project,” Mike tells me. “We always try to be socially aware of the work we do and the result it will have.”

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next wave illustration

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once bitten A Johannesburg-based hotpot of ideas, Bite specialises in animation, production and post-production for film and new media. Leigh van den Berg takes a bite.

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‘I live by Gandhi, learn by Google…’

“That’s probably the piece of work I’m most proud of,” says Graeme, referring to the Audi ad, a seamless blend of live action and 3D animation.

When I email Graeme Carr, creative director of Bite, to ask him why there isn’t a page dedicated to a “who we are and what we stand for” spiel on the company’s website (www.bitevisual.com), he replies that it’s “all about the work, not the wank.” And the work, by all means, speaks for itself.

For one, they’re responsible for super-cool ad campaigns like Cell C’s cy and easychat, as well as the fabulous ‘new kind of normal’ television commercial for the Audi A3 Sportback. You know the one, ‘I live by Gandhi, learn by Google…’

“That’s probably the piece of work I’m most proud of,” says Graeme, referring to the Audi ad, a seamless blend of live action and 3D animation. “I got to experiment with so many different processes, like mixing ‘live action shoot’ with completely digitally created design elements. I liked that there where no rules, which made it a very exciting project to work on.” As it turns out, the judging panel for last year’s Loerie Awards liked it too, awarding it a silver birdie within the Television and Cinema Crafts Animation category. And that’s not the only award Bite snapped up that year – they also received yet another silver statue within the same category for the work they did on a Metro fm campaign.

When I commend Graeme on his company’s accomplishments, asking him what he thinks it is that makes them so successful, I swear I can almost hear him blush over the phone. “You know, we’ve got some really great clients and get to work with some pretty amazing people within the industry,” he says. “I don’t think we’re doing better than anyone else, but we are doing well. It’s a very tough market and everyone in it works really hard.”

Bite’s most recent commission was creating a ‘stopframe’ animated commercial for Super M, Clover’s flavoured milk brand, something Graeme directed and produced himself. A painstakingly slow process, stopframe animation involves shooting ‘hundreds and thousands of still frames’ and then piecing them back together again, bit by bit.

Right now, however, Bite is hard at work on a foreign feature film about which Graeme is particularly secretive. “We’re currently contributing some design and animation elements for a Canadian-British mini-series/movie which will be completed late this year,” he says. “Unfortunately it’s all very hush-hush, as its still being filmed, so I can’t say anymore just yet.” So, just where exactly does Graeme see his company going?

“My plan for Bite is to expand into international commercials and post-production work,” he says. “I would love to get into CG Special Effects, but I don’t want to become a massive factory. I like the fact that we are still seen as the underdog.”

An underdog? Really? Dear, sweet, modest Graeme, if he’s really got his heart set on flying low under the radar, he sure is going about it the wrong way, what with putting out all that fabulous, award-winning and creatively inspired work. If anything, his company’s well on its way to becoming a hot dog and one with a lot of bite.

Visit them at www.bitevisual.com or take a glance at www.pollen. co.za. Pollen is Graeme’s ‘personal label’ to showcase his freelance projects, but the site includes much of Bite’s work.

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vida e caffé / one small seed collaboration

designer coffee cup sleeves In a Design Indaba first, one small seed teamed up with vida e caffé to bring a unique experience to this year’s design expo, which ran from the 24-26 Feb 2006. Working around the theme of ‘Home-Grown, High-End’, some of SA’s hottest design talents, including Rex Creative, Circus Ninja and the one small seed design team, created unique cup sleeves that were served up, as piping hot, with each cup of coffee that vida e caffé distributed from the vida e caffé/one small seed stand at the expo. We take a look at some of the big names behind the explosively creative designs.

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“It was a dark and stormy night, late, many hours of conceptualising, but nothing.

Coffee, I… need coffee. Sip, glug, glug, glug. I felt the fire coursing through my veins, and there you have it, my inspiration. My take on ‘home grown, high end’: Local coffee is lekker and it goes in the high end. Later it’ll come out the low end but that’s in the sequel. Watch this space.”

- Travellyn Hall, network bbdo

“In our interpretation of the theme, we decided to focus on the process rather than its result using only what is right in front of us and to shape new meaning from it. In doing so, we aimed to highlight the fascinating ability African designers have, to do so much with so little! In our view, that was apt commentary on the theme ‘Home Grown, High-End’. This left us with a white canvas and red logotype. The design solution was developed by feeding the letters from the logotype into an on-line anagram generator until it spat out the phrase ‘fed via face’, and it was exactly the kind of happy accident we were looking for. This made new, essential interaction with the brand possible and the rest of the visual solution is pretty much self-evident. Its aim was never to de-face, but rather to use the bare minimum of ingredients and lend new expression to it.”

- Rex Creative

“High-end, home-grown, all comes down to roots. A solid foundation, strong identity and respect for ourselves and where we come from, will be reflected in what we produce. To express this ideal, I chose to create a modern day African goddess, silhouetted in luxurious hues, the graphical forms flowing from her mouth, seeming to come from deep within her, to grow and create a new, unique visual language.”

- Tracey Scully,

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one small seed

“My interpretation of the ‘Home Grown, High End’ theme was completely personal and a literal depiction of the placement, a sleeve on a coffee cup. The character in the illustration is a self-portrait, a collage of hand-inked line work with distressed found images that allows the little voice in my head to speak visually. Although I love the taste of coffee, it is not so much the beverage, but the feeling of travel and place it evokes - of every cup in every weird little town, small shops with big leather armchairs and sticky Danishes and feeling wired in an otherwise completely banal urban environment.”

- Kim Longhurst

“This is a picture that was taken before the brief for the coffee cup design was sent out, but the man in the shot is a ‘Home-Grown, High-End’ talented South African, Mr Carl Addy. He is the freelance creative director of a number of inspiring animated commercials out there at the moment and leader of the band “Raised

by Wolves” among other creative hobbies (www.myspace.com/raisedbywolvesza).

The particular choice of picture works well on the sleeve design layout and in the end captures a moment of real expression.”

- Dylan Cherry

“The inspiration was simply corporate signs of protection. The copyright sign worked well since it would be used on a coffee cup and I just felt it would be interesting for people, particularly our creatives, to walk around with them as though they were copyrighted. I feel it works with the theme since the copyright sign is used to protect a creative piece of work from theft and plagiarism. In some ways it adds value and to the eye it completes a design. I wanted to use this pretence to comment on the worth of our local talent and how we are finally beginning to be recognised internationally as a place of creative power and not just cheap production.”

- Nigel Moore,

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preset

“ We specialise in quirky, offbeat illustrations in a variety of styles and techniques with a distinctive thread of humour running through much of our output. My design for this is a spin on one of the elements in our new company ID and basically just says something about drinking coffee... particularly vida e coffee.”

- Richard Hart,

disturbance design

“I felt that for vida e caffé to benefit most out of it, the design should somehow be related to coffee. The other motivation was obviously shameless self-promotion, so it would be nice if it also related to Science. The theme I elected to worry about at a later stage. After a hectic week of buttering bread, finally the night before I had some time to attend to the sleeve. I don’t quite remember why I started looking up chemical formulae, but I found the formula for caffeine. After looking at the letters for some time, it dawned on me that it was only an “I” short of being “-chino”. If one were to put “cappu-” in front it would almost read “cappuccino”’, which relates to coffee quite nicely, except it would also mean “a cup of caffeine”, which seemed like a good idea and it related to Science.”

- Scott Robertson,

science

“My design was very much a freestyle design rather than anything specific. I used it as an opportunity to break away from my usual style of design and try something completely new.”

- Warren Lewis, circus ninja

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book review

New Fashion Illustration

Martin Dawber BT Batsford Publishers R272, 00

The photograph has long been the medium of fashion, but contemporary illustration is transforming how the industry is presented. In an eclectic collision of fashion and vision, Martin Dawber showcases over 30 of the most accomplished and experimental illustrators from around the world whose work is changing the way we see fashion, free of model worship and the cult of the photographer. Each visual is complemented by information from the artists themselves on how they approach their work, their inspiration and their techniques. Though it is no shock that the new generation of illustrators makes abundant use of digital media and techniques, the surprising array of results - from high-sheen artifice to fantasy collage to work that looks like “old school� pen-and-ink - represents a rich confluence of styles. More than 200 examples of this cutting-edge work convey a host of moods reflecting the state of the modern world as much as that of the fashion industry and revealing a tendency toward the erotic, fantastic, introspective, and sometimes sinister.

New Fashion Illustration is available from Wordsworth Bookstore

Glossy by Autumn Whitehurst

top: Bride by Autumn Whitehurst, bottom: Dandelions Autumn Whitehurst

Fall by Autumn Whitehurst

Pony Tail by Louis Rodriguez

Heavy Metal by Louis Rodriguez

Lace by Jen Renninger

Jen Renninger Birthplace: Tampa, Florida, USA Education: University of Miami, USA; Rochester Institute of Technology, USA Inspiration: Rachel Salomon, Autumn Whitehurst, Andy Goldsworthy, Kiki Smith “Ideally, I would like to create something that resonates with the viewer, something that lingers. I feel so lucky to have stumbled into this profession. I love what I do and the people I work with. What could be better than that?”

Autumn Whitehurst Birthplace: Providence, Rhode Island, USA Education: Maryland Institute College of Art, USA Inspiration: Katsushika Hokusai, Hans Bellmer, George Grosz “Much of what has influenced my aesthetics, especially my love for lines, is the result of having an Asian mother. I don’t know if it’s a genetic predisposition or a cultural influence, but I really can’t help myself. I have an enormous amount of respect for Hokusai, but also for such artists as Hans Bellmer and George Grosz. Their work is simply beautiful. I was told once that you can’t argue with beauty and really, I think that’s true.”

Louis Rodriguez Birthplace: Banes, Cuba Education: Parsons School of Design, New York City, USA Inspiration: Erté, Patrick Nagel, Lillian Baseman, Irving Penn “My style of art stems from many things, including, but not limited to, a love of the human body, Art Deco, black and white photography, urban and industrial images and science fiction and fantasy. My creative thought process sparks off past experiences, present elements that surround me and visions of the future.”

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interface

iPOP fm transmitter

mpeg 4 player

The latest from the iPod family, the FM Transmitter (iPop) transmits your music via any portable music player (iPod, MP3 Player, CD Player, PDA) through any FM radio in your car, at a party or at home. It provides wireless connectivity between transmitter and stereo, with 24K gold contacts for optimum power transfer and corrosion resistance allowing you to share music and share fun beyond your headphones. It operates off a 0.5V (one AAA battery) and comes with a car power adapter (DC12V using cigar jack) with a maximum of eight hours battery running time. Easy to use and with no installation, it’s a must-have for music-lovers and iPod fans.

If turning your lounge into your very own home theatre is close to the top of your priority list, then the LG MPEG4 player is the gadget for you. With a high speed USB2.0 interface, the MPEG4 player allows you seamless video and audio playback of multiple files and supports most file formats from MPEG1 to WMA. It has multi-lingual support for over six languages and easily controllable with a remote control.

Weighing only 160g, it can be carried around quite easily (it comes with a complimentary carry case) and with a sleek silver casing, the LG MPEG4 player is the perfect addition for your new home theatre.

Retails at R399

Retails at R1 088

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bluetooth car kit

video mp3 player

Supporting both headset and handsfree profiles, the Chronos bluetooth handsfree car kit is easy to use and has a slick, sophisticated look about it. With only three operation buttons, this device can be powered from a 12v cigarette lighter and has a hinge for a full 120째 movement and with one basic internal microphone, as well as an optional external microphone, the kit has onboard advance DSP for echo cancellation and ambient noise reduction and is fully functional for up to 10m in open space. Aesthetically, the kit looks neat and functional and would look good against any dashboard, in any model of car. A good buy for those who spend the majority of their time on the road.

Now you can walk, watch and listen at the same time! This neat little gadget is the latest in MP3 technology, with a 96 x 64 music video display, 65000 colour OLED display and memory capacity of up to 1GB for high resolution video, music and photographic image display.

FM radio, digital voice recorder and multilanguage display of ID3 are just some of the features of this player. Weighing in at just 40g and running on one AAA battery, it is the perfect accessory for a quick car trip or a long flight.

The X-Micro Video MP3 400 is just a great all around portable media solution that performs well and looks great.

Retails at R499

Retails at R752

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cello by bridgett stanford, musician

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When they aren’t streaking in badger-friendly honey, Chromoscience provide an eclectic mix of hip hop, jazz, funk and break beat tunes.

Eeshaam September catches up with the trio.

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scientific sound

Soccer and streaking covered in honey, while one of the more oddball foundations on which to build a band, has worked a treat for Sean Ou’Tim (bass and beats), Mark Buchanan (guitars) and DJ Sibot (turntables and beats). They have built up a reputation in independent music circles for doing just what they want and doing it well – and that is to provide an eclectic, electrifying mix of hip hop, funk, jazz, rock, blues and break beat, which grabs whoever listens to them.

Now, while Chromoscience was the band in whose initiation ceremony Sibot was covered in honey and ordered to sprint the length of a soccer field in his underwear, it seems this act fostered a concrete sense of togetherness, which has seen these three musicians collaborate in several bands, notably Max Normal, along with the delightfully weird hip hop emcee, Watkin Tudor Jones.

Beyond their evident comfort in working together, Mark, Sean and Sibot bring a wealth of experience to the table on an individual level. Mark is a classically trained jazz guitarist and composer; Sean is one of the most in-demand drummers in the country, along with having considerable talent as a bassist and producer and Sibot is a founding member of groundbreaking electro/broken beat duo, The Real Estate Agents and one of the most respected hip hop DJs in South Africa.

Even though many of us hadn’t heard of Chromoscience until recently, it is an idea that has been brewing between Sean and Mark throughout their longstanding friendship and the conceptual roots were cemented around six years ago with the addition of Sibot.

“I met Sean at soccer trials when we were 10, on the very same soccer field we made Si(bot) run across while covered in honey - badger-friendly honey that is,” says Mark when questioned about Chromoscience’s origins. “Chromoscience is about Mark, Si(bot) and myself doing the things we want to do without having any pressure. We just bring our gear, plug it in and jam,” adds Sean. “The band was never meant to be specific,” interjects Sibot.

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Despite never having released a recording and performing on average only once a month, Chromoscience are compelling enough that they featured as the headline performers for the 2005 Loerie Advertising awards, as well as performing at the Design Indaba after-party in 2005. Interestingly, although Chromoscience is beginning to get noticed, the guys are very wary of assuming success. As Sibot says: “We’re certainly not doing this for the money. I mean, beyond the occasional big gig like the Loeries, where the pay was pretty good, we don’t try hard enough to make a living out of this. That’s not why we do it.” As a band, Chromoscience exudes a ‘fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants’ kind of aura in their easy-going approach to securing gigs and in the wildly improvisational style that characterises their performances. This easygoing nature, however, has not always been to their benefit and has resulted in them having some less than rewarding experiences.

“We’ve had some really crap gigs, like the time a club manager at this dodgy place in downtown Joburg hadn’t promoted us at all and we ended up playing to five people. Then he paid us with a steak roll each,” said Sibot. “Another time some dodgy club owner paid us in notes that he had pulled out of his underpants! Not cool!” added Mark.

One thing which is blatantly evident when spending any time in the company of this trio, whether at a show or over a cup of coffee, is that they revel in each other’s company.

To watch them on stage is to watch three friends who are playing for the sake of playing and are looking to get everyone around them in on the game. “The three of us are the core of Chromoscience, but we are always involving other musicians, vocalists, rappers that happen to be our friends. It’s about getting together and playing in a relaxed atmosphere,” says Mark.

One of the hallmarks of the existence of Chromoscience is that it has always been the fun, almost sideline project of each of the members. It was their creative escape to air out any ideas that didn’t fit into their other projects. This, however, has changed as Mark, Sean and Sibot are now taking time to concentrate on Chromoscience and Closet Snare, an essentially similar project with a greater focus on the jazz aspects of their sound.

So, it looks like the eclectic sounds of Chromoscience are just beginning to take flight. As Sean says: “We do get seen as a “novelty” band, but we’re fine with that. It just means people are interested.”

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gold fingers With tunes that are taking South Africa by storm, Goldfish are redefining electro-jazz and creating a genre of their own. By Eeshaam September

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Jazz is characterised by its fluidity and is built around the principles of improvisation and reinterpretation. The most revered jazz musicians are those who can take something we all know and make it new and specific to them.

It’s about pushing the envelope and breaking new ground.

This being the case, it would seem that Cape-based electro-jazz maestro’s Goldfish are exactly what jazz needs. Both experienced musicians and jazz performance graduates, David Poole and Dominic Peters have taken all their knowledge of what jazz is and by blending the classical form with electronic innovation, have expanded and possibly even transcended the genre. What they do is jazz and simultaneously more than that.

With Goldfish, Dave (tenor, soprano sax and samplers) and Dom (double bass, keyboard and groove box) have given electronic dance music the performance aspect it has always sorely lacked. House music is a genre, which since its inception, has firmly belonged to the producer/DJ. What Goldfish have and are busy doing is changing that and narrowing the gap between the DJ and the dance floor. They make the music more personal because you can see there are people making it in front of you.

Goldfish was spawned out of the prolific jazz band Breakfast Included and it was here that Dave and Dom first collaborated and connected around both the subject of jazz and their mutual loves of electronic music. 2004 was the year that Dave and Dom decided to take what had previously only been an idea and make it a reality.

In their relatively short lifespan as a band they have garnered considerable success, having had tracks appear on house and down-tempo compilations in Europe, Australia, Asia and the USA. These include the second volumes of the Café d’Afrique lounge series, the Breathe Sunshine house series and most recently, the appearance of a track on the British compilation, Virgin DownTempo Grooves. November 2005 saw them release their début album Caught in the Loop to much acclaim.

“We put two years of our lives into the album and the fact that it has been so well received has been the major drive to take this forward. We’ve already been approached by some people to find out when our next album is being released, so the pressure is a little daunting, but cool,” says Dave.

Hard work goes hand-in-hand with this sort of success and it is evident that Dave and Dom understand the amount of work required and relish the opportunity to prove themselves and ensure their longevity as musicians. “It’s a hard job, it’s not nine to five - more like nine until one in the morning, but it’s fun. We get to party as our job and we love the opportunities that have come out of our work,” says Dom. Among the opportunities Goldfish has manufactured for themselves are appearances at the Up The Creek music festival and regular performances at top clubs in Cape Town. The fact that they’ve been unilaterally well received when they perform is testament to their ability to read a crowd and cater to their tastes accordingly. “One of the best gigs we’ve had recently was on Valentine’s night. Although it was Tuesday night, by about forty-five minutes into the set Miam Miam was heaving,” recalls Dom.

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They refer to themselves as being “like DJ’s, only better” and this stems from the fact that, as jazz musicians, improvisation is the core of their art and their music is created live. Therefore, theoretically a Goldfish performance could run-on indefinitely - not an altogether unpleasant prospect considering the quality of their current musical offerings.

Somehow, in between an average of seven gigs a week and hours of promotional work for their album during the daylight hours, they still find time to surf. This puts paid to the notion of surfers being lazy beach bums and possibly advocates investigation of the relationship between water sports and musical talent.

It is important to note that any implied aquatic relationship between their name and their favourite hobby is purely coincidental. The name Goldfish stems from Dom’s atrocious short-term memory.

One can’t help but be struck by the irony here, as once seen in action, it would be decidedly difficult to forget Goldfish.

relax

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From The North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague to supporting US hip hop group Roots and selling out clubs, Relax has done it all. Since the release of their second album Odeur de Clochard in early 2005, Relax has impressed musos worldwide with their unique sounds that combine elements of hip hop, jazz, drum ’n bass and Latin.

The story of Haarlem-based band Relax begins in 1998. After performing with several bands, lead singer Llewy thought it was the right time to introduce his own style of hip hop. A first demo was recorded in the Flowerhouse studio in Haarlem and the media loved it. Several magazines adopted it as their demoof-the-month and one even called it the demo-of-the-year. Llewy then tried his luck in the Dutch Grand-Prix, a contest for unsigned pop/rock/hip hop acts and made it to the final round. With this unprecedented rise to fame, the next step was obvious and he moved into live hip hop.

It took him two years to fully develop his live hip hop show x-trodinaire. Touring all over the Netherlands, playing in major clubs and big festivals, such as the Drum Rhythm festival, North Sea Jazz Festival and opening up for The Roots in the renowned Amsterdam Paradiso, Relax enraptured audiences large and small with their dazzling appearances. The band also ventured abroad with shows in Belgium and Germany and wherever they went, the response was the same - sheer enthusiasm.

True to form, the band’s first album was recorded live in one of Amsterdam’s hottest live-clubs, the Panama Club. Live@Panama was released in August 2002 and hit the charts with the first single ‘Callin ye name’. The album was also released in South Africa where the band played at the OppiKoppi Festival in the same year and did a small tour.

The band’s second album Odeur de Clochard drastically breaks the carefully built-up reputation of only performing live and the new album is positive proof that these guys can also do their thing in a recording studio. Musically, Odeur de Clochard marks a progression in comparison with its rather onedimensional predecessor Live@Panama. Influences have been integrated in a most clever way, with hip hop, reggae, pop and even the half-forgotten Charleston with its unmistakable swing en harmony vocals. Llewy sings all the harmonies himself, creating a multi-layered wall of vocals and lyrically, the album outdoes itself by going way beyond average rap slogans. One can only imagine what the stage performance will be like.

Relax hits our shores on 31st March for the Cape Town International Jazz Festival where they will perform alongside other prominent international jazz artists.

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musicreviews

by Mia Russell

based on a true story Fat Freddy’s Drop

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The blend of digital dub rhythms, soulful ballads, sun-flecked brass and plaintive vocals that comprise Based On A True Story are the perfect way to dip your toes into the warm musical waves currently rippling around the globe. This album is great to listen to, injected with enough funk to keep from being filler music, yet souled down enough to be able to hold conversations around. It’s a fusion of reggae, dub, jazz and electronica, with different influences coming to the fore, depending on the song. Turn up a good track to enjoy loud and turn down to just go for a mellow ride, possibly in a yellow convertible, heading out of the city with your troubles floating far away.

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New York’s newest underground party pack Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is a band teetering on the fence of obscurity and stardom, with so much hype that even David Bowie is showing up to their gigs. Their self-titled début is an album, which will force even the most hardened listeners to throw in the towel. At its best - the accelerating, rolling guitars of ‘The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teet’ and a frazzled, forlorn ‘Is This Home On Ice’ - CYSHY most definitely offer an addictive, shimmering and, crucially precious and soulful counterpoint to the riot van rabble-rousing of 2006’s main rock infatuation. Let them entertain you. All you’ve got to do is clap along.

clap your hands say yeah Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

lights and sounds

Yellowcard have rightfully recognised the transcendent value of a big, fist-pumping anthem coated with a light dose of romantic schmaltz.

Lights and Sounds’ ‘City of Devils’ employs an orchestra for a chorus with such a sublime lilt that it could melt even the hardest heart. On ‘Waiting Game’, the band turns what otherwise might have been a cheesy melodic hook into irresistible pop confection and on the rootsy acoustic number ‘How I Go’, Key duets with Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks; their voices intertwine beautifully, however overwrought the lyrics. Lights and Sounds may undercut the band’s punk-pop-with-fiddle shtick, but when you’ve got songs this good, you don’t need a gimmick.

Yellowcard

Plans is the fifth album by Death Cab for Cutie and while it moves subtly away from the Death Cab of old, it is instantly recognisable, retains idiosyncrasy and is catchy enough to build on those first tentative footholds in the mainstream.

It distinguishes itself from their back-catalogue by its dense textures; the sound is deeper and bigger. Brooding opener ‘Marching Bands of Manhattan’, the melancholia of ‘Your Heart Is An Empty Room’ and album highlight, ‘What Sarah Said’, wouldn’t sound out of place on Coldplay’s X&Y and while The Photo Album was Death Cab’s most emotionally tearing album, this one was easily their most mature and well written. Make Plans now to pick it up.

plans

Death Cab for a Cutie

Just when you thought there was nothing left to be done with rock along came System Of A Down - a band so off the wall that you couldn’t make them up. Hypnotize is a frantic, frenetic brutal assault on the senses. It mashes up the most intense hardcore, the fiercest fire-starting rock with ridiculously complex riffing. This is the sound of rock with a fierce political consciousness; this is the sound of high intelligence spitting back confusion and anger at the world. Be ready, be very ready.

hypnotize

System of a Down

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audio visual Although the music is still at the heart of a party, the accompanying visual graphics are fast-becoming an art form. Dylan Culhane cuts and splices with two of South Africa’s top VJ’s.

These days it’s difficult to hear a song without wondering what it looks like. In fact, ‘multi-media’ is no longer a buzzword; it has come to define the urban cultural experience. In the same way that the DJ migrated from the confines of a radio studio to the dance hall, the VJ is now a relic of the MTV era and a staple fixture on the club scene. Accordingly, the cult of the video jockey has piggybacked trends on the DJ scene to the point of symbiosis, though it is undeniably a case of an audio chicken hatching a visual egg.

Peter Robson (a.k.a Sightori) is the Jan van Riebeeck of Cape Town’s VJ scene. Talking to him about the evolution of visual club culture in Cape Town, I feel like a student in an ultra-contemporary history class. Back in the day (the day being 1995), Peter realised that the high-end production equipment he was surrounded by in his theatrical staging job could be put to much, well, cooler use. It all started at a club called Gel on Long Street, where clubbers of all distinctions gathered in the name of post-Apartheid hedonism and ‘multi-media experimentation’. Armed with nothing more than a PC and a couple of VCR’s, Peter started projecting fractals and clips from old movies on to the walls. Before long, people would approach him with visual content, waving VHS tapes at Sightori from the dance floor. Easier access to sophisticated software at the turn of the millennium enabled just about anyone to create their own animations and video clips, thereby contributing to the process and expanding interest in the movement. Once the techno scene began to factionalise into any number of electronic genres, VJs, like their record-spinning counterparts, began to develop individual styles.

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According to Peter there are a number of broad distinctions one can make when considering the current wave of performers, aside from the types of beats they work with. The first of these derives from where the VJ sources his or her imagery. On one side of the fence are those who insist on using material they have created themselves, sometimes labeled ‘viewsicians’. Then there are those from the ‘cut-up’ school, who trawl through TV archives, video stores and car boot sales in search of obscure visual material which is then uniquely reappropriated in the tradition of hip-hop DJ’s. Another schism within the scene is the rationale behind the visuals. Whereas many VJ’s perform simply to enhance the party with eye candy, Sightori and grrrl (a.k.a Inka Kendzia) aim to say something through their work, combining diverse imagery in specific ways to offer their own social analysis.

“I collect stuff that I think is important to speak about,” Inka tells me. “I also like putting a story to my work because as humans we’re all quite narrative driven. It’s how we make sense of the world.” A trained video editor who runs her own motion graphics company called meme, Inka is able to refine the skills her day job has equipped her with into a creative outlet that combines her dual passion for music and visual art. Her ‘cut-up’ style relies heavily on the manipulation and layering of visual material she collects. An explosive proliferation of VJ hardware and software in recent years gives artists room for far greater creativity in the field.

In addition to her vision mixer, laptop and midi keyboard, Inka also works off an ingenious system dubbed ‘Miss Pinky’ that allows her to scratch visuals like a hip-hop grand master vinyl fiend would. And given parallel advances in physical computing (or pcomp if you want to sound hip), two turntables and a microphone is only the starting point for far more interactive video manipulation. Science also offers infinite possibilities for the projection of visuals.

Advances in light emitting vinyl could effectively translate into roll-out screens that can cover any surface from ceilings to dance floors to bar counters to toilet seats in the pursuit of a truly surround visual experience.

We start to ramble on about motion sensor bodysuits, midi-triggered drum kits and those cool computer screens in Minority Report and I realise how technology could turn the VJ into more than just an artist but a performer too.

But it’s never a solo performance; Inka and Peter both remind me that music is still the heart of the party and their craft involves following the DJ’s lead in the way a jazz guitarist might improvise with his drummer. The VJ/DJ dynamic is important and alliances are common, though Peter says he thrives off those moments of synchronicity that no one expects when you’re playing spontaneously with an unfamiliar DJ. Today the scene is as much alive on the web as it is in clubs, with knowledge and technology trickling down to bedrooms across the globe. Dozens of online communities, forums, software packages and recorded mixes are but a Google search away. So if you never got around to editing all that holiday footage you shot in the 90’s, why not cut it up, layer in some crazy effects and scratch it over some phat drum n’ bass? Home videos are so passé. www.vjcentral.com www.meme.name

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‘gone with the wind’ by vic fleming, film director

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cinema’s first genius The endearing figure of his ‘Little Tramp’ was instantly recognisable around the globe and brought laughter to millions.

Still is. Still does. By Ann Douglas

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Every few weeks, outside the movie theatre in virtually any American town in the late 1910s, stood the life-size cardboard figure of a small tramp - outfitted in tattered, baggy pants, a cutaway coat and vest, impossibly large, worn-out shoes and a battered derby hat - bearing the inscription ‘I am here today’.

An advertisement for a Charlie Chaplin film was a promise of happiness, of that precious, almost shocking moment when art delivers what life cannot, when experience and delight become synonymous, and our investments yield the fabulous, unmerited bonanza we never get past expecting.

Ninety years later, Chaplin is still here. In a worldwide survey of film critics, Chaplin was voted the greatest actor in movie history. He was the first, and to date the last, person to control every aspect of the filmmaking process - founding his own studio, United Artists, with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith, and producing, casting, directing, writing, scoring and editing the movies he starred in. In the first decades of the 20th century, when weekly movie-going was a national habit, Chaplin more or less invented global recognisability and helped turn an industry into an art. In 1916, his third year in films, his salary of $10,000 a week made him the highest paid actor and possibly the highest paid person in the world. By 1920, “Chaplinitis,” accompanied by a flood of Chaplin dances, songs, dolls, comic books and cocktails, was rampant. Filmmaker Mack Sennett thought him “just the greatest artist who ever lived.” Other early admirers included George Bernard Shaw, Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud. In 1923 Hart Crane, who wrote a poem about Chaplin, said his pantomime “represents the futile gesture of the poet today.” Later, in the 1950s, Chaplin was one of the icons of the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac went on the road because he too wanted to be a hobo. From 1981 to 1987, IBM used the Tramp as the logo to advertise its venture into personal computers.

Born in London in 1889, Chaplin spent his childhood in shabby furnished rooms, state poorhouses and an orphanage. He was never sure who his real father was; his mother’s husband Charles Chaplin, a singer, deserted the family early and died of alcoholism in 1901. His mother Hannah, a small-time actress, was in and out of mental hospitals. Though he pursued learning passionately in later years, young Charlie left school at 10 to work as a mime and roustabout on the British vaudeville circuit. The poverty of his early years inspired the Tramp’s trademark costume, a creative travesty of formal dinner dress suggesting the authoritative adult re-imagined by a clear-eyed child, the guilty class reinvented in the image of the innocent one. His “little fellow” was the expression of a wildly sentimental, deeply felt allegiance to rags over riches by the star of the century’s most conspicuous Horatio Alger scenario.

From the start, his extraordinary athleticism, expressive grace, impeccable timing, endless inventiveness and genius for hard work set Chaplin apart. In 1910 he made his first trip to America, with Fred Karno’s Speechless Comedians. In 1913 he joined Sennett’s Keystone Studios in New York City. Although his first film, Making a Living (1914), brought him nationwide praise, he was unhappy with the slapstick speed, cop chases and bathing-beauty escapades that were Sennett’s speciality. The advent of movies in the late 1890s had brought full visibility to the human personality, to the corporeal self that print, the dominant medium before film, could only describe and abstract. In a Sennett comedy, speechlessness raised itself to a racket, but Chaplin instinctively understood that visibility needs leisure as well as silence to work its most intimate magic.

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The actor, not the camera, did the acting in his films.

Never a formal innovator, Chaplin found his persona and plot early and never totally abandoned them.

For 13 years, he resisted talking pictures, launched with The Jazz Singer in 1927. Even then, the talkies he made, among them the masterpieces The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952), were daringly far-flung variations on his greatest silent films, The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928) and City Lights (1931).

The terrifyingly comic Adenoid Hynkel (a take-off on Hitler), whom Chaplin played in The Great Dictator, or Monsieur Verdoux, the sardonic mass murderer of middle-aged women, may seem drastic departures from the “little fellow,” but the Tramp is always ambivalent and many-sided. Funniest when he is most afraid, mincing and smirking as he attempts to placate those immune to pacification, constantly susceptible to reprogramming by nearby bodies or machines, skidding around a corner or sliding seamlessly from a pat to a shove while desire and doubt chase each other across his face, the Tramp is never unselfconscious, never free of calculation, never anything but a hard-pressed if often divinely light-hearted member of an endangered species, entitled to any means of defence he can devise.

Faced with a frequently malign universe, he can never quite bring himself to choose between his pleasure in the improvisatory shifts of strategic retreat and his impulse to love some creature palpably weaker and more threatened than himself.

When a character in Monsieur Verdoux remarks that if the unborn knew of the approach of life, they would dread it as much as the living do death, Chaplin was simply spelling out what we’ve known all along. The Tramp, it seemed, was mute not by necessity but by choice. He’d tried to protect us from his thoughts, but if the times insisted that he tell what he saw as well as what he was, he could only reveal that the innocent chaos of comedy depends on a mania for control, that the cruellest of ironies attend the most heartfelt invocations of pathos. Speech is the language of hatred as silence is that of love.

On Chaplin’s first night in New York in September 1910, he walked around the theatre district, dazzled by its lights and movement. “This is it!” he told himself.

“This is where I belong!” Yet he never became a U.S. citizen. An internationalist by temperament and fame, he considered patriotism “the greatest insanity that the world has ever suffered.”

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As the Depression gave way to World War II and the Cold War, the increasingly politicised message of his films, his expressed sympathies with pacifists, communists and Soviet supporters, became suspect.

It didn’t help that Chaplin, a bafflingly complex and private man, had a weakness for young girls. His first two wives were 16 when he married them; his last, Oona O’Neill, daughter of Eugene O’Neill, was 18.

In 1943 he was the defendant in a public, protracted paternity suit. Denouncing his “leering, sneering attitude” toward the U.S. and his “unsavoury” morals, various public officials, citizen groups and gossip columnists led a boycott of his pictures.

J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI put together a dossier on Chaplin that reached almost 2000 pages. Wrongly identifying him as “Israel Thonstein,” a Jew passing for a gentile, the FBI found no evidence that he had ever belonged to the Communist Party or engaged in treasonous activity. In 1952, however, two days after Chaplin sailed for England to promote Limelight, Attorney General James McGranery revoked his reentry permit. Loathing the witch-hunts and “moral pomposity” of the Cold War US and believing he had “lost the affections” of the American public, Chaplin settled with Oona and their family in Switzerland (where he died in 1977). With the advent of the ‘60s and the Vietnam War, Chaplin’s American fortunes turned. He orchestrated a festival of his films in New York in 1963. Amid the loudest and longest ovation in its history, he accepted a special Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1972. There were dissenters. Governor Ronald Reagan, for one, believed the government did the right thing in 1952. During the 1972 visit, Chaplin, at 83, said he’d long ago given up radical politics, a welcome remark in a nation where popular favour has often been synonymous with de-politicisation.

But the ravishing charm and brilliance of his films are inseparable from his convictions.

At the end of City Lights, when the heroine at last sees the man who has delivered her from blindness, we watch her romantic dreams die. “You?” she asks, incredulous. “Yes,” the Tramp nods, his face, caught in extreme close-up, a map of pride, shame and devotion. It’s the oldest story in show business — the last shall yet be, if not first, at least recognised, and perhaps even loved.

Ann Douglas is the author of Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s.

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digi

tal f utur e

The first digital feature project of its kind in South Africa, DV8 takes digital filmmaking to new heights.

The current digital revolution sweeping through the world seems to touch Africa, and Southern Africa in particular, in a vague and remote manner. Whilst the world is rapidly embracing all forms of digital delivery and production of filmed entertainment, we appear to only know of it as a distant and complex new trend. However, the time is long overdue to unravel what this revolution means for the distribution and production of feature film in Africa. If we do not embrace this revolution and customise it to our own conditions, we inevitably will not produce any feature films at all.

Realising the need to establish an infrastructure for South African filmmakers to get their full length feature films produced in a stable and secure environment, producers Jeremy Nathan and Joel Phiri created dv8 - a digital film initiative that will over the next three years develop, produce and market 12 genuinely South African digital feature films.

A slate of four films per year will be produced primarily for television distribution, both locally and internationally, and the best films will receive theatrical exhibition.

V V

The first digital feature project of its kind in South Africa, dv8 has been formed out of the desire to develop, produce, market and distribute African feature films, not only throughout Africa, but also throughout the world. With an all encompassing finance, production, local and international broadcast, theatric release and ancillary distribution and marketing model that is set to become the standard for the growth and development of the South African feature film industry, the dv8 model of production has a strong emphasis on script development and training, aiming to strengthen the existing skills base in script development and production of feature films and allowing key creative and technical personnel to build confidence and enhance their existing skills. Representing a new way of making films in South Africa, dv8 offers local filmmakers the opportunity to make their film without having to worry about finance, and allows them to concentrate on writing and directing the best possible films.

It has become clear, not only to producers, but also writers and directors, that if swift, substantive and sustainable action is not taken, African Cinema, as expressed through feature films, will become obsolete. The emergence of new technologies and the creation of far reaching distribution platforms have given rise to an increasing demand for filmed content.

African television stations have shown time and again that audiences want to see their own stories, with the highest television AR’s consistently being local dramas. Feature film production in Southern Africa remains sporadic at best and non-existent at worst.

In response to these needs, the main aim of dv8 is to capitalise on the potential market for feature films that exist on African television stations and eventually cinema screens. dv8’s first feature film, Forgiveness, documents the story of Tertius Coetzee, an exapartheid policeman, (played by Arnold Vosloo), who resigned from the South African police force after giving evidence at the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings. Although he has since been granted amnesty for his crimes, he remains tormented by a bad conscience - the family of one of the victims he ‘eliminated’ did not come forward during the hearings and, for Coetzee, forgiveness remains incomplete. His search for the Grootboom family leads him back to the windswept town of Paternoster and triggers a ferocious series of revelations as events rapidly spiral in and out of control. The film was the first from South Africa to feature at the Locarno International Film Festival held in Switzerland last year and ended up taking home two awards, as well as Best Feature Film at the Cape Town World Cinema Festival.

Hailed by Barry Ronge as “one of the most original films to emerge from the evolving South African film industry…” their second film Max and Mona is a hilarious and fast-paced comedy that transcends across the often conflicting worlds of old and new, whilst delving deep into the very nature of how South African folk mourn our dearly departed. The film garnered a Best First Time Feature (Prix Oumarou Ganda) award at the Fespaco Film Festival in Ouagadougou – Africa’s premiere film festival, as well as Best Feature Film at PanAfricana last year. dv8 is currently in production on the world’s first feature film to be filmed on a cellphone titled SMS Sugar Man. Due to be released in mid-September this year, the story is an original idea of writer/director Aryan Kaganof’s, and takes place on Christmas eve, centering on a Johannesburg pimp, who drives four of his ladies around the city. The film’s producers Joel Phiri and Jeremy Nathan are excited to break new ground. “We love this radical approach, blending the use of appropriate technology with a gripping story. It deviates from the norm and with an experienced director – it’s all about attitude.”

With the intention to facilitate the creation of a sustainable flow of films, not one-off events that become landmarks just for being made, but rather a steady stream of films revealing our many cultures. Catering for established, new and undiscovered filmmakers dv8 aims to reveal Africa’s pool of talented filmmakers through the creation of an ‘enabling creative environment’.

www.dv8.co.za

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In an industry in which digital delivery is embraced, South African cinema joins the party with a world first – a feature film that will be shot on a cellphone.

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Aryan Kaganof, the prolific writer/director of numerous feature films, shorts and video art has embarked on a world first and is currently directing the first 35mm feature film, shot on a mobile cellphone camera. Teaming up with producer Michelle Wheatley and dv8/IMG Films executive producers Joel Phiri and Jeremy Nathan, the film is called SMS Sugar Man. The story, which takes place on Christmas Eve, centres on a Johannesburg pimp, who drives four of his ladies around the city. It’s a feel-good story on a dark evening for the modern urban viewer. The production stars newcomers Deja Bernhardt and Leigh Graves in the two leads. Also contributing to the company of players are John Matshikiza (Wah-Wah), Jerry Mofokeng (Tsotsi), and Luthuli Dlamini (Scandal).

“The evolution of this technology is perfect to tell this story, which uses cellphones as an integral part of the narrative. The girls are umbilically linked to each other and Sugar Man through their phones,” says Kaganof. “The film will be produced in an innovative way,” says Michelle Wheatley, producer of Kaganof’s documentary Giant Steps, which was broadcast by SABC1. “Our technology tests have been amazing and show that you can make a film on virtually any format these days.” dv8 Films producers Joel Phiri and Jeremy Nathan are excited to break new ground. “We love this radical approach, blending the use of appropriate technology with a gripping story. It deviates from the norm and with an experienced director – it’s all about attitude.”

SMS Sugarman is due to be released at Ster Kinekor cinemas nationwide in September this year. For more info visit www.smssugarman.co.za.

moto PEBL formed by nature Holding Motorola’s PEBL U6 phone in your hand heightens your senses. It is a truly tactile experience of luxury and desire. The phone’s exquisite design and ergonomic form will move you beyond the trendy, as you appreciate its individuality and beauty. Inspired by nature’s smooth curves and organic lines, the PEBL is the essence of mobile sophistication and stylish simplicity.

Reminiscent of the feel of a stone worked smooth by water, the oval handset marks another evolution in Motorola’s design ethos. The rounded, soft silhouette entices you to touch and feel this mysterious new handset, and the unique single-touch opening hinge mechanism adds to the allure and enhances the smooth and calming mobile experience. PEBL is simply a perfect fusion of design and innovation. Available in a selection of designer colours, you can select the PEBL that best expresses your own unique individuality.

The PEBL is not only a sensory experience; it includes functionality such as Bluetooth® wireless technology, speaker-independent voice recognition, up to 5MB of memory and a VGA camera. Form and function are seamlessly merged to deliver an effortlessly cool experience in an intuitively tactile design. The PEBL is shaped to be an object of desire.

conejo en la luna

Set in a world where corruption reigns supreme throughout the echelons of society, where scapegoats are sought to cover up a multitude of crimes, where police violence goes unpunished and the trafficking of children is nothing out of the ordinary, Coneja en la luna tells the story of Julie (Lorraine Pilkington) and Antonio (Bruno Bilchir), a young and loving couple with a new baby and a solid, white-collar sense of stability who would give anything to escape the madness.

(rabbit on the moon)

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However, when a loose social connection suddenly ties them to a major political assassination, the two become trapped in the centre of a political conspiracy, innocents desperately trying to adapt to a world of murderous politicians and police that, moment to moment, threatens their lives.

Before long, they find themselves no longer merely fighting for justice, but struggling to survive.

One of the movie’s assets is the way in which the narrative focuses on many characters, jumping from one scene to another to build up suspense.

Jesus Ochoa plays his role so well, creepy yet likable and this portrait is probably his finest (just compare to the shallow cardboard he played in Man on Fire). When a ‘first world’ citizen looks for refuge in his own country’s embassy just to get a “Hey man, come back tomorrow at eight,” from a night watchman, you get a glimpse at the director’s good eye for the reality touch.

This is probably the first Mexican urban thriller that doesn’t fall into goofyness or folkloric gags to draw the audience in and Ramírez-Suárez makes no secret of the proximity of his noirish thriller to the work of Hitchcock or Costa-Gavras. It’s a hard movie with a terrible subject and wonderful realisation and, like his famous peers, RamírezSuárez makes use of the attractions of the genre for a piece of enlightening and compelling social analysis - in this case the portrait of a country in the throes of a state of political emergency.

Nominated for the Best Film in last year’s Bogota Film Festival, as well as taking home the Best Supporting Actor Award at the Ariel Awards in Mexico, Coneja en la luna is one of Mexico’s best films of the year.

Coneja en la luna is due to be released in South Africa on 21st April 2006.

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Hotel Rwanda

ry Zane Hen ssell and

by Mia Ru

Hotel Rwanda, which invites comparisons to Steven Spielberg’s harrowing 1993 Holocaust drama, Schindler’s List, tells of the attempted 1994 genocide during the civil war in Rwanda - a tragic, senseless part of recent African history that most viewers will be only vaguely familiar with.

Following his 1996 directorial début, Some Mother’s Son, writer-director Terry George delivers a compelling dramatisation of a Rwandan man’s quiet heroics in the midst of his country’s 1994 civil war. Harrowing images and soul-wrenching tragedy will leave the viewer rattled, but if Hotel Rwanda can achieve in reaching a broad audience and educating them on the unnecessary tragedy it portrays, then it will have done its job. A must-see.

iews dvd rev

Directed by: Terry George Starring: Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte, Cara Seymour, Joaquin Phoenix, Desmond Dube, Antonio David Lyons, Mothusi Magano Category: Drama

MR

Layer Cake

Directed by: Matthew Vaughn Starring: Daniel Craig, Colm Meaney, Sienna Miller, Michael Gambon, Jamie Foreman, Kenneth Cranham, and George Harris Category: Drama/Thriller A contemporary gangster film that both looks and feels like a Brit noir classic filtered through the Jam’s bangon sense of style, Layer Cake forgoes Ritchie’s Byzantine plotting and bad-lads-on-holiday stylistics in favour of a more realistic approach to Britain’s criminal underclass.

Craig plays Layer Cake’s unnamed protagonist, a charmingly smooth drug runner who has decided to opt out of what he quite accurately views as an increasingly hazardous profession. With all the makings of a ludicrously entertaining début that echoes Ritchie’s own bullet-riddled and laddish outings without ever actually stooping to their juvie-surreal level, this is a brilliantly multi-faceted piece of work, which doesn’t reveal all its layers until you’ve taken the last bite.

MR

Red Dust

Directed by: Tom Hopper Starring: Hilary Swank, Ian Roberts, Jamie Barlett, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nambitha Mpulwana Category: Drama

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This powerful drama is set against the backdrop of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, one of the most significant instruments created to heal the wounds of apartheid to help close the most painful chapter in the country’s history and provides a glimpse into this groundbreaking method from the perspectives of the victims, their families, and those who stand accused of barbaric acts against humanity. Unfortunately, Red Dust isn’t as powerful as it should be. A story like this one should pack an emotional wallop, but Tom Hooper’s routine and low-key direction softens the impact. The ending, too, is a little manipulative as it drives home the film’s core message of reconciliation. Still, the movie gives audiences an insight into a widely overlooked and misunderstood chapter in world history. Like Hotel Rwanda, this is an important film.

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Back Roads

Directed by: Phillip Noyce Starring: Bill Hunter, Gary Foley, Zack Martin, Teri Camilleri Category: Action / Drama

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This movie is a classic example of director Phillip Noyce’s (of Dead Calm, The Bone Collector, Patriot Games fame) early days. The two protagonists are once again outcasts; Bill the itinerant, petty-thief rebel-rouser and Dave his good, clear-thinking, articulate Aboriginal friend. They pick up hitchhikers on their way across Northern New South Wales, stopping by Dave’s reservation and generally having a good time. The movie gives the actors scope to make a balanced statement on the nature of racism.

Backroads succeeds because it is sensible and makes no definite statement on the race debate. A very enjoyable film that probably gave the Australian Film Commission courage to make others like Rabbit Proof Fence.

MR

Lords of Dogtown

Directed by: Catherine Hardwicke Starring: Emile Hirsch, Victor Rasuk, John Robinson, Michael Angarano, Heath Ledger, Nikki Reed, Jeremy Renner, Eddie Cahill, Shea Whigham Category: Drama Lords of Dogtown is the feature-film adaptation of Stacy Peralta’s seminal documentary Dogtown and Z-boys. It chronicles the lives of four childhood friends growing up in the surf-slum of Venice Beach and how they re-define skating by melding it with the fluid aesthetic of surfing.

Hardwicke, of Thirteen fame, takes a similarly hard line in examining the origin of skate culture. Moving away from the doccie feel of Dogtown and Z-boys, Hardwicke employs healthy doses of character development and narrative arches that draw the audience into the compelling story. The film is a satisfying blend of entertainment, information and emotional immersion.

ZH

Cinderella Man

Directed by: Ron Howard Starring: Russell Crowe, Renée Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, Craig Bierko, Bruce McGill, Paddy Considine Category: Drama Ron Howard really wears his heart on his directorial sleeve. His films are invariably emotionally driven feelpieces that paint the human condition in broad brush strokes. In Cinderella Man, he re-teams with Russell Crowe, his A Beautiful Mind alumnus. This time around it’s the portrayal of heavy-weight boxer James Braddock.

The film does an admirable job of portraying Braddock’s struggles and moral wrangling as he loses his pride when he can’t support his family during The Great Depression.

The film is a feel-good under-dog story that will have the most hardened cinema-goers cheering in their seats.

ZH

dvd selection bought to you by

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I live my life with strong-mindedness; Majestic in character and sophisticated in fashion, Spacious in capacity and efficient in activity Growing out of my strength To maintain my own identity.

I strive for tranquil harmony And resolve to find the truth, I scan the horizon of my life Far beyond my limitations In search of what drives me To keep me dreaming about beauty And the possibilities of the world‌

118 With a fuel capacity of 6 litres and fuel consumption of just 40km per litre, the Eurojet scooter is highly economical and easy on the pocket. Weighing in at only 120kg, it is easy to manoeuvre, even for the most intrepid rider and its powerful air-cooled four-stroke engine makes the bike a zippy ride. Available in a range of colours to suit your personality and offering two different models, this scooter is both technically sound and aesthetically pleasing and will answer your every need.

The Eurojet shop in Buitengracht Street, Cape Town, also offers a first in whileyou-wait service – you can sip on a coffee and relax with a fantastic view of Table Mountain while your bike is being looked after and with a turnaround time of under an hour, you’ll welcome the break!

With cumulative years of experience between them in both the automotive, retail and restaurant industries, owners Mark Fyfe and Larry Bagg launched the Eurojet brand with the aim of providing a trendy and affordable way to escape the hustle and bustle of the city and live the good life and this scooter does just that. With the wind in your face and the taste of freedom on your tongue, let your Eurojet weave you out of the traffic jam and take you wherever you desire - along the sparkling coastline to the sea, up winding roads into the mountains, or through endless rows of green vineyards in the winelands… Wherever you need to be, the Eurojet is the way to get there. Live the good life.

Eurojet Scooter 125 Buitengracht Street Cape Town Tel: ( 021 ) 424 4131

When you think of a trend-spotting agency you could be forgiven for picturing a New York loft full of IPod wearing hipsters. Instant Grass, Africa’s leading trend-spotting agency (or youth connectivity agency as they prefer to describe it), are several thousand kilometers from the nearest New York loft and although you might find some of their staff sporting IPod Nanos they’ll probably be listening to Bongo Maffin rather than The Strokes.

Instant Grass are hunting down the latest lifestyle trends in some of the most dynamic youth culture environments in the world: with their hunting grounds including Soweto, Luanda, Lagos, Nairobi, Moscow and even Stellenbosch. The trends they track can range from how religion fits into the life of young Africans, to attitudes on using technology for dating. With 60% of South Africa’s population under 24 years of age, and similar figures in the other markets they study, understanding the mindset of African youth is critical to the survival of many businesses operating in developing markets.

The company was conceived by Cape Town-based ad industry veterans, Ian Calvert and Greg Potterton and has since grown rapidly. Instant Grass now employs over 180 grasses in over six African countries and has recently expanded into Eastern Europe with the opening of an office in Moscow. Since 2003, the company has grown to become the premiere experts on African youth culture and marketing, with its sights set on being the number one trends agency in developing markets worldwide. With clients already including the likes of MTV, Adidas, Unilever, Red Bull, MTN and Levi’s, as well as a marketing agency of the year award from Adfocus, it’s not an unrealistic goal.

The key to the company’s success is the young, trend-obsessed, trend-spotters (or grasses) it employs. The profile Instant Grass looks for is an individual actively involved in the youth culture of their community; they could be a club DJ or promoter in Lagos, a photography student from Luanda or a pro-surfer from Cape Town, what counts is that they prove a passion for tracking down trends and a marketing savvy approach. Part of the buzz for these individuals is the knowledge that the insights they report go directly to the directors of some of the world’s most powerful brands and shape how products are made and marketing campaigns produced.

The company ended 2005 with an added bang, having Greg Maloka, ex-general manager of YFM and perhaps South Africa’s leading authority on youth culture, joining the team. Greg brings an enthusiasm and drive for making companies understand the complexities of talking credibly to young people. His attitude of challenging of lazy preconceptions about young people is representative of the ethos behind Instant Grass. The company is about much more than spotting the latest fashion trends in Soweto or the hottest new club in St Petersburg (although they could certainly do that), Instant Grass is about providing genuine insight into the attitudes, ideals and lifestyles of young people in the developing world.

www.instantgrass.com

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www.rice5.com is the online portfolio of a maverick Hong Kong design company that specialises in web-design, interactive design and what-the-eff-is-that-design. It’s the online equivalent of a flip-card, showcasing the cream of the company’s creative output.

The site has a distinctly Asian feel and has all the edgy quirkiness of the terminally cool.

Site navigation proves a little daunting with reams of Cantonese sprinkled everywhere and obscure button placement. The design is not what one would call clean. In fact, it’s mildly chaotic and decidedly idiosyncratic. Once you get the hang of it though, you get sucked into the compelling eccentricity of it all. Your guide through the wormhole is a dumpy little Asian man that scuttles along after your mouse clicks and dumps menu items out of cardboard boxes (trust me, you have to see it to understand). Flash-design is pushed to the limit, being used as more of an artistic medium than a construction tool. Unfortunately, the lofty ambitions of the designers hamstring any internet connection with low bandwidth. The loading times are rather long for anyone chilling in an internet café or using a generic modem. The designers obviously assumed that dial-up is like, so last season and everyone is hooked up to ASDL. Sigh.

The designers of www.boyblack.co.za have their bases covered. They warn you at the outset that if you are epileptic or light sensitive you shouldn’t enter the site. And with good reason.

Upon entering, you are immediately bombarded with a barrage of blinding lights, flashing thingies and whirling whatsits so staggering you’ll be reaching for a pair of sunglasses in a trice. boyblack is a compendium of web-design featuring a host of South African talent. It is an exercise in Flash design that had my webdesigner girlfriend scratching her head. The entire site is rendered in GIF images, thereby economising on bandwidth and ensuring rapid-fire downloading (a boon considering this country’s deplorable bandwidth). Ignore the entirely un-ironic homepage and drink in the unmitigated chaos of the sprawling site.

The execution is just so out there that one can’t help being sucked into the bizarreness of it all. It is fully interactive so you’ll find yourself moving the mouse with trepidation as flocks of crows and cartwheeling golliwogs careen across the screen. Just be warned. You’ll probably be needing a Panado or two afterwards.

By Zane Henry

Kubikfoto is an online exhibition of digital photography that pushes technology into the realms of art. The designers of the site clearly pulled out all the stops in creating a space of beauty. The amount of work that must have gone into the site is staggering. Even though the images are fully interactive and three-dimensional, all the pictures are real photo’s that are free of digital touch-ups, CG construction or surreptitious Photoshopping.

Check out the ‘making-of’ link where you can see how the images are constructed using strategic lighting, innovative camera set-ups and plenty of cardboard and super-glue.

The real-life construction of the images is an ingenious way of leap-frogging the spectre of low bandwidth. Innovative ActionScripting keeps page after page of flat pictures fresh and compelling, while swooshing retractable menus add to the interactivity. The DIY feel belies the consummate professionalism of the site. After all, beyond its obvious artistic merit, it is a corporate entity that showcases award-winning images and successful campaigns. Kubikfoto brilliantly toes the line between creativity and business proving that the unholy alliance is conducive to compromise.

www.dotedesign is the online CV and portfolio of Domenic Tedone, an Italian designer that works in all areas of visual design. His expertise ranges from illustrations, graphic design, webdesign, multi-media design, video editing, compositing and corporate branding. Quite an extensive resume for a 25-year-old. The website itself is made in Flash. The intro is rather cute with an animated zipper ushering you in to the site. The look is Spartan with crisp colours and artful use of dead-space. One can look at his creative output and corporate campaigns as well as download wallpapers and his CV. Tedone’s work is perfectly suited to the design. It is minimalist and understated with a distinctive appreciation of tight lines and austere structuralism. However, while the aesthetics are virtually flawless, the site is let down by underwhelming usability. Bewildering button placement and awkward navigation mar the overall congeniality of the site. Optimisation can be improved as the loading times are needlessly long and do get annoying. Tedone’s ambitions and immense creativity are laudable but are let down by runof-the-mill design basics.

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Subscribe now for only R20 an issue and receive a free copy of Fat Freddy’s Drop’s latest cd, Based on a True Story (offer is valid only for the first 10 subscribers). Subscription costs include postage fee for countrywide delivery.

Visit our website www.onesmallseed.com or contact the one small seed head quarters on +27 (0)21 461 6973, contact@onesmallseed.com for further details.

website: Registering on www.onesmallseed.com will ensure that you are kept up to date with any new additions to one small seed, as well as any exciting events and competitions that will be taking place.

Eskom Energy Efficiency Lighting Design Competition This competition is open to professionals and students in the fields of engineering, architecture, art and design. The goal of the competition is to demonstrate that efficient lighting technologies can be used in very contemporary and attractive luminaires intended for residential and commercial lighting. There are a number of categories for students and working professionals to participate. Cash prizes with a total value of R125 000 are at stake.

Closing date: Contact:

18 August 2006 marina@southernscience.co.za or visit the website www.southernscience.co.za

Promosedia International Chair Design Competition

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The aim of the competition is to stimulate innovative creative ideas, which must however be technically feasible. Submissions are invited which express originality and innovation and which identify the use and function of the chair, giving due consideration to ergonomics, choice of materials and the requirements for mass production. The competition is open to designers under the age of 40 on 9th September 2006, as well as architects, designers and students duly enrolled in Tertiary Design Institutes and Faculties of Architecture.

Closing date: 5 May 2006 Contact: CALT Relazioni Pubbliche,

Tel: +39 0432 229127 e-mail: promosediadesign@caltpr.it

Communication Arts Competition Juried by nine top design professionals and attracting entries from 20 countries, each year’s Design Annual features 250 pages of the best work in posters, brochures, packaging, trademarks, corporate identity, annual reports, catalogues, letterheads and signage, and is fully indexed for reference. Published each November, 76,000 copies of the Design Annual will be sold and distributed worldwide, assuring important exposure to the creators of this outstanding work.

Closing date: 2 June 2006 Contact: competition@commarts.com or visit www.commarts.com/ca/magazine/comp

First Designers’ Independent Award The DID Award is an online competition for designers worldwide. All entrants are welcome, from students and freelancers to corporate professionals. All entries have equal opportunity: manufactured products or concepts and the top 10% of winners will be selected in each category as top-rated designs. Each winner receives the DID Award Certificate of Merit and all winning designs appear in the DID Yearbook.

Closing date: Contact:

30th April 2006 http://www.didaward.net/entry.htm

International Photography Awards The International Photography Awards conducts two parallel competitions each year: one for professional photographers, who earn the majority of their livelihood from their craft, and a second for non-professional photographers. IPA is open to photographers from all parts of the globe. The professional and non-professional major winners will also compete for the coveted title of International Photographer of the Year™, the Lucie and the $10,000 prize. The recipient of this top honour will also be announced at the Lucie Awards ceremony.

Closing date: 31 May 2006 Contact: info@photoawards.com or visit http://www.photoawards.com/04/contests/index.asp

HOW Magazine’s 8th Annual Interactive Design Awards Any interactive, interface and motion designs (including advertising videos) for the Web, kiosks, broadcasts or for use on Windows or Macintosh platforms, including CD-ROMs and DVDs can be entered. Consumer websites, games, self-promotional and business-to-business websites may be entered with the online entry form. Entries must have been created between January 1, 2005 and August 1, 2006 and all winning entries will be featured in HOW’s huge April 2007 Design Annual.

Closing date: Contact:

17 July 2006 http://www.howdesign.com/competitions/idc/index.asp

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