POC MAG # 1.1

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It’s a big old question, a brain-freeze of a conundrum with the potential to blow your mind. But there’s no time for questions when your temples pulsate with the daily grind and you’re getting fatter, thinner, bigger, better in the perpetual pursuit of more, more, more!

What would happen if we all just… stopped. Slowed right down. Stepped outside. And took a look around?

We’d be an athlete in tune with the mountain’s gravitational pull, or an artist who sees a canvas when she looks up at the sky. We could be an architect whose work sits in harmony with the land, or a designer who learns from nature, instead of pointing out its faults. We’d carve our name onto the planet without destroying it until it’s gone.

Engage with nature. Enjoy the mag.

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M u s ta f a h A b d u l a z i z / M J R

danny macaskill 08

Fever Ray 48

Andrew Shandro 10

Fjäll Architecture 50

online phenomenon.

F r e e r i d i n g fa m i ly g u y.

James Niehues 12

Man of the maps.

Julia Mancuso 14

P r o f e s s i o n a l p l ay e r .

Thomas Campbell 16

Renaissance surfer.

Tanner Hall 18

F r e e s k i i n g R a s ta .

Permaculture Brazil 20

P r e s e rv e r s o f t h e A m a z o n .

Katie Paterson 22

Touching the cosmos.

Jim Denevan 24

Californian sandman.

Designed by Nature 28

How the beetle transformed design.

Electro songstress gives opera a go.

B e a u t i f u l b u i l d i n g s at o n e w i t h t h e l a n d .

Aurélien Ducroz 58

F r o m t h e m o u n ta i n t o t h e s e a .

New York Skate 60

S k at e b o a r d h i s t o r y, t h r o u g h a n E a s t C o a s t l e n s .

Twilight Stills 66

Ethereal landsc apes, by Michael Kenna .

Martin Söderström 72

Swedish style, Polish bike.

Viva Tel Aviv 74

C u lt u r a l r e p o r t f r o m t h e p r o m i s e d l a n d .

Jon Olsson 80

He soars, he skis.

Ecovillage 82

Setting up camp in the name of green.

Daniel Dhers 32

Japan Surf 86

BM X a m b a s s a d o r b a r e s a l l .

A q u at i c a n t h r o p o l o g y f r o m N i p p o n ’ s s h o r e s .

Tim Knowles 40

Lacan 94

D r aw i n g w i t h t r e e s .

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Is surfing real?

GW146 « Show Your Moves » – SUJZ111 « Street Club » – GB239 « Moving Beat »

collection

The exciting new creative community hosting great design competitions. Get involved!

Swiss made – www.swatch.com

Editor Andrea Kurland Associate Editor Ed Andrews Assistant Editor Shelley Jones CREATIVE DIRECTORS R o b L o n g w o r t h & Pa u l W i l l o u g h b y Editorial Enquiries editorial@thechurchoflondon.com Advertising Enquiries ads@thechurchoflondon.com 06

Images M u s t a f a h A b d u l a z i z / M J R , Y v e s B o rg w a r d t , C e l y n B r a z i e r, N a t e B re s s l e r, J a m i e B r i s i c k , Ru t h C a r r u t h e r s , M i ke C l a r k , Fa n t a s t i c N o r w a y, M a t t i a s Fr e d r i k s s o n , M i c h a e l F o r d h a m , Max Hamilton, Carlos Hernández, Richard Hogg, Jarmund/Vigsnæs, Michael Kenna, Tim Knowles, Åke E:son Lindman, Sterling L o re n c e , J a m e s N i e h u e s , I m m a n u e l M e i e r, G u y P i t c h o n , L a u re n Ro s s , U g l y l o g o , Wilhelmson Arkitekter Words King Adz, Matt Bochenski, Jamie Brisick, R i c h a r d C u n y n g h a m e , M i c h a e l Fo r d h a m , V i n c e M e d e i r o s , J a y R i g g i o , T i m S h a w, Fa t To n y, S t e v e Ya t e s , O l l y Z a n e t t i

POC MAG is published by POC, in collaboration with The Church of L ondon, makers of HUCK magazine.

The Church of L ondon To p F l o o r 8-9 Rivington Place London EC2A 3BA +44 (0) 207-729-3675 w w w. t h e c h u r c h o f l o n d o n . c o m The articles appearing within this publication reflect the opinions of their respective authors and not necessarily those of the publishers or editorial team.

Made with paper from sustainable sources.

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Danny MacAskill’s bike skills are the hottest thing online.

Words Shelley Jones Photography Mike Clark

Danny MacAskill is a Picasso on two wheels. If art is about appropriating raw materials to make something unique then, with his bike as a brush and the streets as a canvas, he really is the greatest painter of them all.

A laid-back, unassuming guy from the middle of nowhere – Dunvegan in the Isle of Skye to be precise – Danny soared to fame last year when a homemade video of him riding his trials bike in Edinburgh went viral on YouTube. The hits now total over fifteen million.

“It’s very odd,” he says modestly. “My flat-mate Dave and I made that video with no expectations whatsoever. We made it just for fun, you know – just for ourselves. I mean we put a lot of time and effort into it but it’s amazing to think that something we made has had an impression on that many people.”

Danny got into bikes as a wee four-year-old and was attempting skids and wheelies before most kids give up stabilisers. “I’ve always had it in me,” he recalls. “I liked to jump off the highest thing I could. My friends’ parents would be worried about them coming into my garden in case they got hurt. I had a lot of freedom to do what I wanted.”

Part of that freedom came from Danny’s supportive parents, and partly from growing up in an environment where he could ride mountains by day and hop off rooftops by night. “My friends and I would always be out getting up to mischief in the middle of nowhere. It was a cool place to grow up,” he says fondly. After riding everything Skye had to offer, and living a few years in the idyllic ski resort of Aviemore, he relocated to Edinburgh to work in a bike shop and try more street riding. But Danny does not draw a line between urban and natural environments. “To me, when I step out of my door, it’s like being on the top of a mountain,” he says. “Rather than walking around a city and seeing nice buildings here and there it’s nice to be able to see everything as more of a playground. I used to look at things and wonder if anybody could ever [jump or balance] on them and now it’s cool being able to do it all easily.”

As well as his meteoric rise to online fame, Danny scored a part in a Doves’ music video and an advert for Volkswagen Golf. But the twenty-four-year-old isn’t about to get complacent anytime soon. Instead he wants to get more creative like his heroes Chris Akrigg and Martyn Ashton. “Those guys rode trials how I’ve always seen it – your bike is there to roll about on as well as hop… it’s cool being able to do whatever you want, no one telling you what’s right or wrong.”

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Canadian freeride mountain bike pioneer andrew shandro is doing it for the kids.

Words Richard Cunynghame Photography Sterling Lorence

“I think it’s awesome right now, from a racing side of things,” says Andrew Shandro about the current state of mountain biking, a sport he has spent a lifetime immersed in. “The courses seem to be good, there’s a lot more traction in the press and the competition obviously is tighter, which is awesome. It’s having a huge impact on our sport again, which is great to see.”

As a freeriding pioneer, less concerned with competition than exploring deep backcountry for film and magazine shoots, it’s surprising to hear the North Shore, Vancouver, native talking so enthusiastically about downhill racing. He has, after all, been synonymous in recent years with the rise of the sport outside the traditional race scene. But, as he explains, there is a lot more to his past than his current guise as big-mountain freeriding nobility: “I was a racer most of my life, I started racing cross country back when I was seventeen, and I pretty much raced downhill for the whole of the nineties.”

The thirty-eight-year-old didn’t just dabble in a bit of racing – he dominated it from the top, clocking up two World Cup wins in MontSainte-Anne, on Canada’s East Coast. “One was against a crazy Swiss guy named Philippe Perakis back in ’91 or something,” recalls Shandro, “and then the next year I beat [John] Tomac. That kinda kickstarted my career.”

Tomac wasn’t just another rider so much as the rider to beat.

And the significance of the win didn’t pass young Shandro by: “As soon as you beat Tomac, people start to pay attention, right?”

Having earned respect from the racing cognoscenti, it was just a matter of time before Shandro veered towards more open plains.

“The North Shore [British Columbia] is big on the freeride side of things,” explains Shandro. “So for me it was really just a matter of being in the right place. I kinda dabbled a little bit in filming and shooting for magazines while I focused on racing. But by 2000, after

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ten years of competition, I lost my passion for racing. I still love to ride – I appreciate it more because life’s busy – but I needed a change and the freeride thing was starting to take off.”

As a key player in the growth of freeride mountain biking – and stalwart of the annual Red Bull Rampage – it’s a wonder Shandro has time to pass on the lessons he’s learned. But that’s exactly what he does, through his Summer Gravity Camps in Whistler, which launched in 2002.

“I wanted to start something where I could be based at home, for the summer at least,” explains Shandro, who has a son and daughter under the age of ten. “I can see the kids every day but I’m also working. That was a motivating factor. And I love coaching and being around kids – you get to ride with hundreds of different people from all around the world and expose them to the sport.”

So how does the life of a family man fit with that of a maverick mountaineer? “When we had our first child it did make me wake up a little and go, ‘Okay, you really need to think this through a bit more.’

You can’t be so seat-of-the-pants when you have a family to take care of – it’s not just about you anymore. I mean, you’ve gotta have some spontaneity in your life. But at the same time you need to make sure that there’s food on the table.”

When he’s not riding monster mountains or putting food on the table, Andrew finds calm in reading and is “paying more and more attention to the whole sustainability issue.” Even when the seasons change, he sticks to the outdoors. “I love skiing, and hockey’s good fun,” he laughs. “And then obviously the summer is full of riding. That’s my job and my passion.”

Having devoted his life to that passion, Shandro isn’t about to stop anytime soon: “There’s a few of us that have been in it since the beginning and are still plugging away, doing what we’re doing.”

it’s a freaking work of art!

W o r d s Ed A n d r e w s Artwork James Niehues

Getting lost sucks. It’s annoying at best but, when it happens on a mountain, it can also cost you your life. That’s what piste maps are for, right? Everyone knows that. What everyone doesn’t know, however, is that those life-saving bits of paper are often lovingly crafted by hand.

“I can probably draw a mountain better than anyone else,” says sixtythree-year-old James Niehues (or Jim to his pals). As the man responsible for hand-painting piste maps for some of the world’s top ski resorts, the Colorado native isn’t boasting – he’s simply stating a fact. He has, after all, spent a lifetime perfecting his craft.

“Colorado gives you canyon lands to alpine peaks and so I’ve always wanted to paint scenery,” explains Jim, who started painting while bedridden with a kidney illness in his early teens. What began as a hobby became a career after Jim found himself working in a print shop in Denver, shadowing the work of then-trail map illustrator Bill Brown. Since drawing his first trail map of Winter Park, Colorado, in 1986 under his own name, Jim has gone on to draw maps for a whole host of resorts from Whistler, Canada, to Muju, South Korea; Thredbo, Australia, to Portillo, Chile.

So how does one approach such a mammoth task? Far from simply pulling up an easel in a valley, Jim works from aerial photographs, taken from a small plane that circles the mountain from all angles, to get even the smallest of details correct. “I put together a sketch and send it to the client,” says Jim. “There will always be alterations but after that, I hand-paint it.”

The wonders of technology (i.e. Photoshop) may come in handy when making corrections but, ever the artist, Jim stays true to his watercolour roots. “You can’t get any better than just painting with a paintbrush. It lets you produce so many different colours and textures – you can reproduce the outdoors so much better that way.”

So does this mean that, after a hard day’s skiing, that water-stained piece of paper in your pocket is in fact a work of art? “It’s still essentially a map,” he concedes, “and so the priority is to get it right. But the images that make up piste maps produce a desire to visit that place or provoke memories. And that’s art!”

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Does Olympic skier Julia Mancuso have the ideal life? w o r d s E D AN D REWS PHOTOGRAPHY Lauren Ross

“I would class myself as a professional recreationalist,” says twentyfive-year-old pro skier Julia Mancuso. “I just love playing outside.”

‘Playing outside’ may seem like an unusual way to describe a gold medal in giant slalom at the 2006 Winter Olympics and no less than nineteen podium places across the disciplines of super G, giant slalom and downhill on the FIS (International Ski Federation) World Cup tour, but this is exactly how Julia sees her life. Sure, there may be brief mentions of banal things like ‘career’ and ‘hard work’ but then it’s straight back to the fun.

Growing up in the beautiful playground of Lake Tahoe in Northern California, Julia began fooling around on a pair of skis at the age of three. Twenty-two years later, she now splits her time between Tahoe and the Hawaiian shores of Maui, where she indulges in a variety of solo sports including biking and stand up paddle surfing.

“My personality and my spirit tell me to do things that are freer in nature,” says Julia. “I love the balance of what I do though – it’s a yin and yang thing. Each aspect of my life brings me back to the next, like if I’m in the water too much, I really crave getting back on the snow. And at the end of the ski season, I’m ready to get out of all those clothes and climb into the warm ocean in Maui in only my bathing suit.”

But as someone who lives for recreation, does Julia ever feel inhibited by the rigid structure of the FIS tour? “Sometimes when I am on the ski tour, I feel a little constrained and not able to express myself fully,” she concedes. “But ski racing is pretty dangerous, so you need a little bit of control and discipline there. Besides, there is no comparison to a downhill run, going off a jump and feeling confident to go as fast as possible.”

Anyone familiar with the world of ski racing will know that each result rests upon the tiniest of margins, and that a fraction of a second can mean the difference between showering in champagne at the top of the podium and going home empty-handed. Surely the cruel hand of fate plays as much a part as athletic performance?

“There’s definitely a lot of luck,” admits Julia. “It’s hard to grasp what one-hundredth of a second is. But over a season of races, the best skiers normally come out on the better side of luck. It’s not like flipping a coin and hoping for the best. If you put your skill into it and try your hardest, you will end up with a good result.”

Far from relying on luck, Julia has managed to secure countless victories thanks to an unrelenting positive attitude. It’s a mental state that seems to permeate every aspect of her life, and she is keen to promote this ‘living every day to the fullest’ mindset to the wider world. She is an ambassador for Right to Play, a humanitarian charity that promotes sport and recreation in the developing world.

She also takes a keen interest in her highly personalised website, offering fans a plethora of blogs, photos and videos of her life.

Judging by the adoring messages from devotees, Julia has been elevated to something of a celebrity. “It’s important for fans to have somewhere to go and be inspired. And not just to become a really good alpine skier, but to get outside and challenge themselves in every aspect of life – shoot for the moon and realise that dreams can come true,” she gushes.

But things weren’t always so rosy. In the early 1990s, Julia’s father, Ciro, was imprisoned for smuggling marijuana. Though the incident was a catalyst in the break-up of her parents’ marriage, this difficult period of Julia’s childhood inadvertently spurred on her skiing. “The hill was always my sanctuary,” she says thoughtfully. “I’m not sure if what happened with my dad drove me to spend more time on the hill but looking back, that’s just what I loved to do.”

As this magazine goes to press, Julia is still beaming from her recent success at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver where she relished the opportunity to compete “at home” in North America. Having worked with a physiotherapist to iron out the injuries that plagued her over a disappointing ’08/’09 winter season, Julia swooped up silver medals in both downhill and super combined. Two medals in a week may be taxing for some, but it’s all in a day’s work for this professional player.

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Aquatic

Renaissance The vision of Thomas Campbell bridges he gap between surfing and art. words Michael Fordham

Filmmaker, painter, serial doodler and photographer Thomas Campbell is prolific in so many mediums that his work is impossible to pigeonhole. But the very elusiveness of the work is having a lasting influence on the way surfers ride waves.

Though he has a deep and varied background in art and the Californian skate scene, the softly spoken Santa Cruz resident came to most people’s consciousness with the release in 2001 of Seedling. Billing itself as a ‘loggin’ movie dedicated to small waves, it was the first in a projected triptych of films in which Campbell would focus on a pod of open-minded surfers whose style took elements from the lineage of wave-riding, and reinterpreted it in contemporary contexts.

Seedling demonstrated Campbell’s signature off-beat aesthetic – including heavy colour saturations, unusual compositions and a lo-fi score that threaded scenes together with a relaxed ambience. With the lightest of touches, Seedling came to redefine what it was to make a surf movie.

Sprout, the second episode of the triptych, picked up where Seedling left off. “With Sprout I just wanted to show people what we as surfers have.

There are a lot of really amazing styles of surfing out there that are not publicised. Surfing is a sensational activity and there are so many different types of sensations. I don’t give a shit what you’re riding as long as you are enjoying your sensations.”

Campbell’s approach is from a fine art perspective, whereas the vast majority of surf movies are firmly rooted in the industry and its allencompassing commercial agendas. “Painting, drawing and filmmaking are very emotional media, and that’s one of my main targets – emotional interplay between different words and images,” he said in 2004. “I might shoot a sequence and suddenly part of it is out of focus. I find that sometimes creates a situation where it’s not so literal and it’s more of an emotional field of imagery. You, the viewer, have a little bit of space to step back and have your own feelings about what’s going on.”

By doing little conventional marketing of his work, the artist has helped spark a mini Californian surf renaissance that has paved the way for a whole swathe of surfing filmmakers, artists and photographers to expose their work to an increasingly broad audience. The Present, the third and final part of the trilogy, is a step beyond the early explorations. Textured, layered and edited with the same attention Campbell gives his visual art, the film has sent shivers down the spines of acolytes of the artist’s approach. Jeff Divine, photo editor of The Surfer’s Journal, recently told me: “Thomas has schooled everyone in a different, modern approach to capturing our sport.”

Without the backing of the mainstream surf industry, Campbell has come to define surf-oriented creativity in the 21st century more than any other individual.

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One Love Freeskiing sensation Tanner Hall likes his reggae served ice cold.

W o r d s E D AN D REWS Photography Mattias Fredriksson

“Man, no one makes the mountain come alive like Nicolas does, it’s sick, you know?” says Tanner Hall, the admiration in his voice adding value to his words. “Without snowboarding, all this freestyle skiing wouldn’t be happening.”

Despite sharing mountains for the past thirty-odd years, some skiers and snowboarders still believe a rivalry exists between their two tribes. But when you hear one of the world’s most famous freeskiers praising Swiss snowboarding genius Nicolas Müller, that myth is instantly dispelled. Then again, Tanner Hall is no ordinary skier.

Hailing from Kalispell, Montana, the twenty-six-year-old started skiing at the age of three and, describing himself as an “ambitious young kid”, was throwing down tricks by the time he was ten. Just eight years later, he would go on to claim his first Winter X Games gold in big air, the first of seven across the disciplines of big air, slopestyle and superpipe – a record that has yet to be beaten. More recently, after countless podium finishes on the ’08/’09 Dew Tour, he tied first place with superstar snowboarder Shaun White for the Most Outstanding Athlete award.

It’s Tanner’s willingness and ability to go big, and stylishly so, that has seen him become a poster boy for the likes of Red Bull and Oakley. But as well as lending kudos to the work of others, Tanner is co-founder of Armada Skis – a hardware and apparel company he set up with fellow skier JP Auclair and photographer Chris O’Connell – as well as co-owner of a cat-skiing hill called Retallack in British Columbia. Tanner, it seems, has got it made.

But freeskiing is inherently dangerous and progression can come at a price. In March 2005, Tanner shattered both ankles trying to clear the infamous 130ft Chad’s Gap in the Utah backcountry.

The impact was something that he has described as “dynamite going off in my feet” and the brutal video footage of the resulting screams makes for uncomfortable viewing. In May 2009, he endured a tibial plateau fracture in both knees when he went too long on a motocross-style jump at Steven’s Pass in the Cascade Mountains, Washington, and had to undergo immediate surgery. When pushing

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the boundaries of the sport, and often his luck, how does he face up to the risk of serious injury?

“Oh man, you’ve just got to push through it, and not think about it too much,” he replies in his characteristically relaxed manner. “I wear my helmet as often as possible and I encourage everybody else to do the same. You know what you’re doing but accidents can happen. But you have to keep having fun, life’s too short, man – we’re not here that long, so you’ve got to take full advantage.” And Tanner has learnt to make the most of every single moment, choosing to spend his injury respite back in education earning his high-school diploma as well as covering events for Fuel TV and working on a documentary about his life due for release in autumn 2010.

This laidback approach can be attributed to Tanner’s keen interest in Rastafari culture. It’s something that has seen him grow dreadlocks and, more often than not, choose reggae tracks to accompany his many video parts. Even his signature POC helmet features the red, green and gold. “I always remember listening to Bob Marley when I was like ten years old and it just kinda all spun out from there,” says Tanner. “I love the music as I definitely think there is a positive message in it that you can put in your everyday life. I mean, I’m not saying that I’m a Rasta, and I don’t live my life to the Rastafari standards, but there are definitely bits and pieces that you can take from that culture and apply to your life in the mountains.”

Despite his love for the tropical culture surrounding reggae, Tanner is still very much a mountain man. “There are so many aspects to skiing and snowboarding and that’s why it’s just so fucking cool,” he says. “I like to go to bigger mountains. It’s a different style of riding than in the park and it definitely appeals to me a lot more as I get older. There’s a lot of hiking, snowmobiling, heli-drops – it’s a lot harder to do. I mean if it wasn’t, everybody would be doing it.”

But as someone who openly admires snowboarding talents like Nicolas Müller, is there any chance we’ll see Tanner make the shift from two planks to one?

“No, not really,” he replies bluntly. “Skiing is pretty much my life.”

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Working with nature for a more sustainable future.

W o r d s VINCE M E D EIROS ILLUSTRATION uglylogo

When I say the word ‘permaculture’, you may very well think of a variety of stereotypical things: hippie communes, tepee living, naked men and women embracing trees in a far-off forest whilst chanting shamanistic hymns to some obscure deity of the natural world.

But you’re wrong.

Permaculture, young misinformed man and woman of the city, is about thinking – and you can do it whether you’re in a flat overlooking the high street or in the depths of the Amazonian forest.

In a nutshell, permaculture is a combination word, made up from ‘permanent’ and ‘culture’. Developed by Australian Bill Mollison back in the seventies, the term has come to signify agricultural systems that are synonymous with words such as ‘renewable’, ‘organic’ and ‘green’.

It aims to work with, and not against, nature – unlike industrial-scale agriculture, which tends to be heavily reliant on agrotoxics, fertilisers, and an army of machines (ploughs, harvesters, etc) that run on fossil fuels and damage the soil and its inhabitants.

The web is awash with other definitions, should you feel inclined to check it out, but trust me: ‘ecological design’ is the one phrase that’ll stick. That is, we must use nature – and the ecological interactions that it has developed over millions of years – by designing systems of production that take advantage of naturally occurring relationships.

For example, if you wanna grow vegetables in your back garden, don’t dig it up to plant seeds – simply apply a layer of compost year on year and allow worms to do their thing by mixing up the compost with underlying layers. That’s what worms do, you see.

Instituto Permacultura da Amazonia (IPA), based in Manaus, Brazil, are setting a fine example by putting permaculture into practice. IPA’s goal is to help create sustainable human settlements with an approach to land use which weaves together plants, animals, soils, water management, local food technology, alternative energy, forest economics and human needs into intricately connected and productive assemblies. This, they say, is the ideal alternative to

monoculture and slash-and-burn farming in the Amazon.

Ali Sharif, who runs IPA, explains: “The natural rainforest that we see was modified by indigenous people to serve their purposes which were indivisible from ecological principles. Agriculture was the engine of their economies and this is why there is such a fantastic level of edible diversity. Why is it that almost every plant and tree has some kind of service function?”

Absurd as it sounds, these days the Amazon, home to the world’s largest biodiversity and to ancient self-sustainable communities, relies for the most part on imports to feed its people. “Over 80 per cent of deforestation is contributed to by food production, whether soybeans, cattle, or family agriculture,” says Sharif. “The state of Amazonas, which is almost as large as all of Europe, imports nearly 70 per cent of its food from southern Brazil. The Brazilian Amazon contributes 8 per cent to Brazil’s GDP while emitting 65 per cent of its carbon emissions through deforestation.”

IPA set up camp in a ten-hectare chunk of land that had been made sterile after deforestation, farming and cattle production had destroyed any prospect for future use. In its early years, the project’s goal was to bring the land back to life. Agroforestry, aquaculture and small-scale animal production systems were subsequently developed. Quick example: IPA have set up a meliponiculture system (the keeping of stingless bees) that uses wild species to produce honey for local communities and for export, all the while benefiting the forest as roughly 80 per cent of pollination in the Amazon is done by bees. IPA’s agricultural systems have become important models for the local peoples of the Amazon, and a key tool in the fight against deforestation and in favour of a more sustainable approach to farming in the region.

Wanna help? Why not try your hand at permaculture at the local level. All you need is a patch of green, and the desire to do the right thing.

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Luminescence Conceptual artist Katie Paterson takes on the unseen forces of the cosmos and beyond.

Words and photography Michael Fordham

Artist Katie Paterson breathes life into the elements that make up Earth and the cosmos. Whether she is mapping the death of all the dead stars known to science, recording and transmitting the sound of a melting glacier or reflecting music from the surface of the moon, her work enables us to engage in a dialogue with forces too immense or too abstract for us to engage with in other ways.

“Hopefully that’s what happens when you confront the work. It expands to become something much more than what you’re faced with in the gallery,” Katie tells me over coffee as a diffuse morning light angles in from the window of her kitchen. What you’ll find at a Katie Paterson exhibition might be sheets of black steel pinpricked with light; a simple docket documenting recorded time; a cluster of light bulbs that simulate moonlight; transmitter-receivers and speakers emitting the sounds of dying stars and melting glaciers; Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata bounced from the moon. But these physical elements are simply the thin skin of a set of profound enquiries into the nature of things that is at the heart of the work.

Though the minimalist veneer of Katie’s art might hint at the contrary, she is actually working firmly in the Romantic tradition, a tradition in which the artist enquires into the nature of the sublime, and in which landscape, moonlight and cosmos are acknowledged as manifestations of human imagination. “There’s always this sense of scepticism, if that’s the right word, encoded into my work. How possible is it, for example, to replicate moonlight? How possible can it be to listen to the sound of a dead star?”

Considering the scale and ambition of her art, the twentyeight-year-old Glaswegian remains remarkably down-to-earth.

She spends half her time at the edge of London’s Victoria Park and, after a recent move, the other half in the artists’ paradise

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that is downtown Berlin. But the day-to-day practice of what she does involves constantly meeting, learning from and exchanging ideas with astronomers, ice and rock scientists, communications technicians as well as the odd Zen master. Though she walks the Earth like the rest of us, there is a luminescent delicacy about her that reflects, perhaps, the intangibility of the ideas to which her work gives form. “There’s an obvious environmental connotation to a lot of my work, of course. But it was never my intention to make overt environmental or political statements. They are actually very quiet pieces.”

That profound quietness resonates throughout Katie’s work.

It is a silence through which the whole of life and the breadth of the imagination can be drawn. Like the deep well created by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami at the centre of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the emptiness is deep and all-encompassing, yet at one and the same time it represents the whole of existence.

Having collaborated with UCL astronomers while studying at Slade School of Art, she is hoping next year to take up the post of Artist-In-Residence at UCL’s Department of Astronomy.

In the meantime, the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth has brought her a grant that will enable her to travel to Hawaii to work at the Mauna Kea observatory with Cal Tech astronomer Richard Ellis. “Richard is trying to find the first star, the very origins of the universe. I’m interested in how you can conceptualise that, how you can evoke the light that emits from the beginning of time.” The question that emerges is this: at the furthest reaches of enquiry, at the place where Katie creates, do science and art become one? www.katiepaterson.org

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Jim Denevan’s monumental art captures the shifting sands of time.

Words Andrea Kurland

Size matters. People will try and tell you otherwise but if you want the truth, ask Jim Denevan – the Californian artist whose work has gone from big to monumental in a matter of years.

Things started out simply enough, on a regular walk along Pleasure Point Beach, Santa Cruz. “It was low tide,” he explains, “and this stretch of beach that had no marks on it suddenly made me think, ‘Lots of people draw on the beach but I wonder what it would look like really big.’” With that seedling in mind Jim reached for a piece of driftwood and, after a good few hours of crouched-over drawing, took a step back to admire his work.

“I walked to the top of a cliff – there weren’t many people around – and it showed up super well in the evening light,” says Jim. “Right from the beginning I knew I would be doing this for a very long time.”

That was back in 1995 and, like all good stumbled-upon ideas, Jim’s free-hand sand drawings naturally evolved into a much bigger thing.

A museum debut came in 2005, when gargantuan photos of his beach doodles appeared in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

Then the big boys came a-calling and, in 2007, Jim found himself on a plane to New York for a group show at über-prestigious P.S.1 MoMA. But four walls and white space aren’t really Jim’s thing. “The work in the moment is more interesting to me than any document or picture of it,” explains the forty-nine-year-old life-long surfer, “because the moment of that particular day or time is integral to the artwork. What I really love about the beach drawings is how people come upon them. It hasn’t been announced that it’s there and when they slowly perceive that it’s a composition, they can walk to the centre and contemplate the artwork, or if they’re children they’ll run up really fast. I love that kind of thing – when people don’t know who it came from or why.”

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It’s no surprise that Jim and his art have a predilection for the great outdoors – growing up “watching the waves break from [your] childhood home” will do that to a person. Having lived a stone’s throw from seminal surf spot Pleasure Point his whole life, Jim has never been able to stay away for too long – boomeranging back after a short stint modelling in Milan in his twenties to work as a chef by night, and surf by day. His toes safely back in the sand, the only obstacle Jim faces is Mother Nature’s clock. “I can only draw for about five hours – the period of peak low tide – as I like to be finished a few minutes before the tide starts to erase the drawings,” he explains. “I love that smooth motion, from being able to come out onto the drawing’s surface to finishing it, and then the wave coming and beginning to wash everything away. Maybe the ocean is a dance partner at that moment. I make my move, and then the ocean comes and plays its part.”

For years, Jim’s drawings lived in a harmonious state, coming and going with the ocean’s ebb and flow. But sensing something bigger lay beyond those precious few hours of low tide, he decided to venture inland and take on the boundless plains of the Nevada Desert. Without an erosive drop of water in sight, the possibilities seemed endless and, in May 2009, Jim etched a geometric masterpiece that measured an epic nine miles in circumference.

A lot of work, for one man and a stick.

“Because the desert is such a huge space, I’d walk around for two or three days before drawing anything,” explains Jim, who walked in circles for a whopping 100 miles for his first desert drawing in 2008. “Without GPS or anything, visually I’m trying to find the best place to start. I’ve got to think about where the mountains are and how it fits the space. Then working out from a

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central point, I composed for several days – which was a first, as usually the tide would come in. It’s hard work, but it’s a nice feeling of being pleasantly exhausted.”

Time may not be an issue on the desert’s arid plains, but Jim’s landlocked drawings are no less ephemeral than those that live by the sea. Erased by the weather and people bombing around in ATVs, their lifetime may be fleeting but, for Jim, that’s half the charm: “I like the idea of coming back a year later and making a drawing in the same place where the ghost of the previous year’s drawing used to be.”

All spiralling circles and rigorous organic forms, Denevan’s drawings may be an ode to biology – impeccable re-imaginings of microscopic organisms, pimped-up to mammoth size – but his connection with the Earth doesn’t end at the beach. In 1999, he took his passion for local produce cultivated from his former life as a chef and, inspired by his organic farmer brother, created Outstanding In The Field – a travelling culinary experience that’s reminding people to eat a little closer to home. “We take this table that sits as many as 200 people, and bring together local farmers and artisans in one place to enjoy the fruits of the region,” explains Jim, who’s broken bread with local communities as far afield as Italy and Alaska.

But when he’s back home in Pleasure Point, watching as his work is irrevocably erased, what kind of message does he hope they leave behind? “We need to take care of what we have because it will all wash away – just like the drawings, we’re only here for a short time and, sooner or later, everything turns into something else.” www.jimdenevan.com

photography Gregoire Alexandre

blackcrows-skis.com

beyond the spectrum of light, albino crows turn red at night

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�esigne� b� �atur� �ould the humble �arden beetle be the essence of �ood design? �ccording to a new wave of thinkin�, the answer is ye�.

Words Matt Bochenski I L L U STRATIONS C e l y n B r a z i e r

The essence of good design is discretion. At its best, it’s invisible – bypassing the eyes and brain, and burrowing straight into the subconscious. Whether blinded by it or simply blind to it, we rarely stop to think what it is, exactly, that makes good design… good. It just is; as inevitable and obvious to us as breathing. Design is natural – but we’ve no idea just how natural it has become.

From the American military to universities and cuttingedge design labs, a quiet quantum shift has taken place and a scientific revolution is underway. But where the Renaissance taught us, in the words of Francis Bacon, to “torture nature for her secrets”, this new movement is founded on a more humble approach to the natural world.

For billions of years, evolution has been putting the natural world through a rigorously competitive process in which the strongest survive and the failures are fossilised. But do we appreciate nature for the vast, untapped laboratory of scientific

solutions that it is? Judging by a new wave of thinking, some of us are beginning to cotton-on. It’s called ‘biomimetics’, and it’s taking the design world by storm.

Taken from the Greek words ‘bios’ (life) and ‘mimesis’ (to imitate), biomimetics – also known as biomimicry – represents a fundamental shift not just in design strategy, but in our relationship with the world. Simply put, biomimetics is all about taking nature’s great ideas – how birds fly, or why tortoises have shells – and implementing them in technology and design. As Janine Benyus writes in her book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, “In a society accustomed to dominating or ‘improving’ nature, this respectful imitation is a radically new approach… Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her.”

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“The more our world looks and funct likely we are to be accepted in this ho This new discipline, in which science and nature work side by side to provide new ideas, new solutions and radical new designs, is the province of Professor George Jeronimidis of Reading University.

“It focuses on areas where our own technologies may have limitations,” he explains, “and then looks out in a biological context to see what addresses the same kind of problem, and what kind of solutions have occurred in the biological world.”

Biomimetics is still a relatively young science.

The name itself has only been around since 1991, but as an intangible idea it can be traced back centuries, to the winged glider of Leonardo da Vinci, or even further – to the tortoise shell tactics of the Roman legions.

It wasn’t until 1941 that biomimetics got its big break, in the unlikely shape of a man and his dog.

The man was Swiss engineer George de Mestral who was tired of brushing burdock seeds from his dog’s fur. Examining them under a microscope he realised that the seeds contained hundreds of tiny hooks that were attaching themselves to the fibres of his dog’s coat. A bit of clever science later and George had invented Velcro.

But it was only when the US Air Force got involved in the late ’80s that biomimetics really got started. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster (as Benyus points out, after the Wright brothers successfully studied vultures to learn about drag and lift in 1903, it only took another ten years or so

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before we were dropping bombs out of the sky), don’t worry – it’s not what you think.

According to Jeronimidis, the military weren’t looking for new weapons – just a new approach.

“One of the big differences between biology and technology is the fact that biology builds things from the bottom up,” he says. “In biology, the building blocks are at the molecular level. We tend to do things the other way round – we take a big chunk of steel and build a machine out of a large proportion of it after we’ve come up with a shape that we think is the one we need.”

In fairness, biomimetics has already transcended its roots as a military project – reaching into universities, design studios and corporate R&D departments as awareness grows and more funding becomes available. But it has its critics. Alongside, say, stem cell research and nanotechnology, biomimetics is the kind of Star Trek science that promises to give us creative control over our environment. So is there a danger of getting caught up in our own hubris? Not as far as Jeronimidis is concerned. “In biomimetics you are not interfering at all with biological processes,” he argues. “Quite the opposite – you are there to simulate.”

If anything, as biomimetics becomes a cornerstone of modern science, it places even more emphasis on environmental awareness and conservation. After all, if nature is our laboratory, when we destroy a part of it we destroy millions

of potential experiments. As Jeronimidis explains: “There is a very strong connection between efforts over environmental issues and biomimetics. Not because of moral reasons, though I believe that there is that too, but primarily because, from a practical point of view, if we lose that information then we haven’t got a starting point.”

This newfound awe in the face of nature is brilliantly captured by Benyus: “When we stare deeply into nature’s eyes, it takes our breath away, and in a good way, it bursts our bubble. We realise that all our inventions have already appeared in nature in a more elegant form and at a lot less cost to the planet. Our most clever architectural struts and beams are already featured in lily pads and bamboo stems. Our central heating and air-conditioning are bested by the termite tower’s steady 86 degrees. Our most stealthy radar is hard of hearing compared to the bat’s multifrequency transmission. And our new ‘smart materials’ can’t hold a candle to the dolphin’s skin or the butterfly’s proboscis. Even the wheel, which we always took to be a uniquely human creation, has been found in the tiny rotary motor that propels the flagellum of the world’s most ancient bacteria.”

You’re already experiencing the benefits of biomimetics – you just don’t realise it. Next time you strap on a helmet when you take to the slopes, picture a goat’s skull resting on a table in the POC Lab in Stockholm. POC has successfully integrated

ions like this natural world, the more me that is ours, but not ours alone.” the principles of biomimetics into its design strategy, with some fascinating results. According to CEO Stefan Ytterborn, “The majority of companies out there do not have a strategic view on product development as design, where everything is integrated into one common process. But this is not the case at all from our point of view. Design is something that optimises the process of solving a challenge.”

Gathering a multidisciplinary team of polymer and technical engineers alongside industrial and graphic designers, Ytterborn began to look to nature for inspiration. When considering plans for a new helmet, they studied the skeletons of horned animals to see how they coped with the enormous stresses placed on the skull during fights. They found a goat whose skull was based on panels with softer tissue in between to absorb the impact of any blows. That was the starting point for a process that eventually resulted in up to 7,000 collective decisions, at the end of which POC had created a unique kind of race helmet. “We don’t consider design to be a cosmetic thing,” Ytterborn stresses.

“Relevance is everything to us. We need to come up with something that we feel can solve a problem in a better way compared to anything else so far.”

Alongside goat skulls, the protective plating of the beetle has inspired the new range of POC body armour, but there are even more bizarre experiments to be done. “We’re about to use the

corpses of pigs to see how specific methods or concepts and solutions will work with something that is as close as possible to the human body,” Ytterborn reveals, before adding reassuringly, “but we’re not killing them ourselves.”

The variety of talent at the POC Lab speaks to another key strength of biomimetics – its diversity.

Such is the scale of the planet’s biodiversity, and such is the multifunctionality of its organisms, that scientists from all disciplines are looking to nature for a hit of inspiration. And it’s mind boggling stuff: the optical flow of insects recreated in the sensor systems of aircraft; spider’s silk re-imagined as a replacement for Kevlar; sand crabs as the basis for planetary digging machines; rat whiskers on robots for collision detection; the lotus leaf morphed into self-cleaning paint; micro-flying machines that use insect wing technology; jewel beetles repurposed as fire monitors… The list of projects is endless. As Jeronimidis confirms, “We have the right strategy, the problem is the knowledge of people who can provide the additional step of converting ideas into technology. Scientists and engineers don’t have direct access to that information unless they collaborate very strongly with the biologists.”

‘Collaboration’ isn’t often a term associated with nature, where the Darwinian struggle for survival makes for a dog-eat-dog world. But biomimetics isn’t about slavishly copying our environment – it’s an opportunity to develop a new way of thinking

about the problems that confront us. The designers and engineers at POC have taken that to heart.

Future projects include looking at bird feathers to find new absorbing materials that can be turned into lightweight plastics – “It’s super interesting,” Ytterborn enthuses.

But the promise of biomimetics isn’t just ‘interesting’. It’s awe-inspiring. If we get this right, we’re looking at a new age of invention that we’ve barely begun to comprehend. Jeronimidis is currently working on a project to understand how crickets use a super-sensitive hair on their body to interpret whether a gust of wind is just a gust of wind or a warning of an approaching predator (“It’s amazing!”). He’s also looking into “the Holy Grail” of biomimetics, octopus tentacles – capable of being squeezed into almost any place – which represent a bold new frontier of robotics.

But it’s Benyus who provides the best summary of what the future might look like if we reach our ultimate goal: “Solar cells copied from leaves, steely fibres woven spider-style, shatterproof ceramics drawn from mother-of-pearl, cancer cures compliments of chimpanzees, perennial grains inspired by tallgrass, computers that signal like cells, and a closed-loop economy that takes its lessons from redwoods, coral reefs and oak-hickory forests…

“The more our world looks and functions like this natural world, the more likely we are to be accepted in this home that is ours, but not ours alone.”

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�tep by step with Daniel Dhers, �enezuela’s ambassador of BMX. Words Fat Tony P h o t o g r a p h y M u s t a f a h Abd u l a z i z / M J R

t’s so politically complicated that the people are struggling really, really bad… It’s almost communism, you know… You are pretty much living in a jungle.” This is how Daniel Dhers describes his hometown of Caracas, Venezuela. It’s been a long journey for the twenty-four-year-old BMX phenomenon, all the way from his South American roots to the upper echelons of the BMX cognoscenti. And it’s a journey that doesn’t look set to stop anytime soon. When we meet in September 2009, Daniel has already spent a few years as one of the most successful BMX riders in the game, and is looking ahead to figure out what his next major step in life will be.

While growing up in Caracas, Daniel’s family were always supportive and they encouraged him to try out a variety of sports ranging from soccer to karate. But when he was thirteen, Daniel dropped everything when he found his calling. He vividly remembers his early days of BMX and how it began to consume his life. “I started riding in February of 1998,” recalls Daniel. “Once I started riding I loved it, so I kept riding. I remember I had a Haro Shredder that got stolen and I got a Dyno Compe instead.”

When you take up a sport like freestyle bike riding there are risks involved and Daniel’s first bad crash left a hole in his mouth where a tooth once sat. It also left a bad impression with some of his family members who wanted him to stop riding after the accident. But Daniel’s habit-forming personality wouldn’t let him give up BMX. In 2001, three years after he began riding, Daniel and his family made the move from one end of the continent to the other – from Caracas, Venezuela, to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

It was there that Daniel really started to progress, riding several hours every day, and learning as many tricks as he could. “There weren’t that many good parks, but there were a lot of good riders and I think that helped me out a lot,” he says.

Although he’s adamant that he always rides for himself, Daniel knows that competing against other riders has an important place in his sport and says that “without contests, BMX would not be where it is right now.” Daniel was still living in Argentina when he entered his first pro contest and was already ahead of the curve enough to beat out the rest of the riders and get a taste of victory, something he has since come to know well. But the level of riding in a South American contest could not compare to the

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level seen at the contests being held in the United States. “That’s what pushed me,” says Daniel, “if I could do well [in South America], I figured I’m ready to try the next level.” Daniel knew that the only way he could progress enough to get to that next level was to once again uproot himself and move – this time to the United States.

In 2004, after being invited by veteran pro rider Tom Stober, Daniel found himself en route to what would later become his new home, Camp Woodward. The camp is virtually a small village nestled in the middle of America’s Amish country in rural Pennsylvania. It is a giant plywood playground where BMX riders and skateboarders are free to enjoy the sport they are passionate about alongside like-minded athletes. In the summer months, Woodward is like any other camp for America’s youth; parents from all around the country pay a fee for their kids to escape for a week and live among peers in cabins. But, instead of going canoeing and making crafts out of macaroni, campers of all ages and abilities ride from morning until night, under the instruction of professionals who help them improve their skills and learn new tricks. In the off-season, Camp Woodward is a home and training ground for some of the world’s top action sports athletes.

Having been based at Camp Woodward on and off for the past five years, Daniel is considered something of a lifer. The day-to-day living at Woodward quite literally consists of eating, sleeping and riding BMX, with the occasional game of Guitar Hero thrown into the mix. When the world’s top riders come together and have nothing else to do but ride, serious progression transpires. If it wasn’t for living at Woodward, Daniel says, “I don’t think I would be anywhere near where I am today… Woodward helped me polish my riding and improved it one-hundred per cent... I feel like I went from a level ‘C’ riding to a level ‘A’ in a year just from riding so much.” It was here, at a camp among the rolling hills and open green fields of Woodward, Pennsylvania, that Daniel moulded himself into a rider that could dominate every contest he entered. uring his debut on the U.S. professional contest scene in 2006, Daniel wasn’t quite as confident in himself as he is today. “I remember going to qualifying [at the Dew Tour] terrified because I didn’t know what was going to happen,” he says. “It was that one shot to actually make it.” For the young South American it was extremely intimidating to be riding head-to-head with some of BMX’s biggest names, including living legends like Dave Mirra and Ryan Nyquist. But not only did Daniel make it through that first qualifying round, he claimed a podium spot at nearly all of the contests that year, and finished the season by winning the overall title of the world’s biggest contest series, the Dew Tour.

It was an absolute whirlwind from that point on. Throughout 2006, 2007 and 2008, Daniel was virtually unstoppable on the contest scene. He has won almost every major event around the world including two X Games gold medals, three year-end titles at the Dew Tour, and one of the most prestigious honours in BMX, Ride BMX Magazine’s Number One Rider Award. As if that weren't enough, this summer

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Dhers made it to the very top of the sport by winning the BMX World Championships in Cologne.

In his third major year of successful riding, Daniel’s fame finally caught up with him. Before that, he says, nothing was really different, but today Daniel can’t go anywhere without people coming up to him or calling out his name. “It’s crazy because a baseball player will get recognised, but I wouldn’t think that what I do would get any recognition because we are a much smaller sport.” It is that recognition that has helped give Daniel more confidence and has taken him from being the soft-spoken guy on the sidelines to the outgoing superstar in the spotlight wherever he goes. But with that spotlight comes certain responsibilities – pressures that can at times seem overwhelming. “Sometimes at a contest I am signing a thousand autographs and I’m like, ‘Alright, I don’t want to say ‘no’ to the next kid, but I’m seriously over it,’” admits Daniel. “Before I would definitely try to sign until the last one. Now it’s like, ‘Man, I’ve been here for thirty minutes and I’m missing practice.’” And who can blame him? After all, riding his bike is what Daniel was so passionate about in the first place; everything else just came with the territory of being a champion. o now that he has conquered the BMX contest world and come to grips with his fame, what’s next for Mr. Dhers? Well, like so many successful riders before him, Daniel is looking to move away from Camp Woodward in search of a more relaxed, yet equally progressive, riding environment. He plans to buy a house towards the end of 2009 in a small college city on the East Coast known to the BMX world as ‘Pro Town’, and to the rest of the world as Greenville, North Carolina. “I feel like Greenville is the next step,” says Daniel. “Woodward, for me, was a steppingstone and it was definitely what I needed to get my riding going, but I feel like now I know how to make my riding improve… I still ride for three or four hours a day, but I don’t have to just focus on riding like at Woodward where I have nothing to do but ride.”

To the untrained eye, moving from a facility like Camp Woodward to a college town may seem like a regression, but those involved in BMX know how conducive to riding Greenville actually is. More than a few dozen professional riders live in Pro Town and they all feed off each other when it comes to riding and enjoying life outside of BMX. Dave Mirra and Ryan Nyquist both own indoor ramp warehouses in Greenville, a few of the pros have backyard ramp setups, and the town boasts an outdoor skatepark along with great terrain for street riding. But unlike Woodward, Greenville has more to offer away from the bikes.

Daniel is looking forward to finally putting down the plastic toy that connects to the Guitar Hero videogame and learning how to play the instrument for real. And although he may turn down some contests or trips next year in return for being grounded for more than two weeks at a time, don’t expect Daniel’s riding to slow down. After rising from an unknown kid from South America to a global action sports hero, Daniel Dhers is far from being done with BMX. He is ready to take that next step and is ambitious enough to know that there will be many more steps to come before he is ready to call it quits.

But who knows, with a guitar in his hand, Daniel’s addictive personality may kick in again just like when he started riding BMX. “I might not be able to put it down,” he admits. “Maybe I’ll become the next Slash...”

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�hereve� th� �in� �rtist Tim Knowles let� nature take contro�.

Words Andrea Kurland P OR T R A I T P A UL W I LLOU G H B Y

Tim Knowles has two brains. We all do, actually.

Sort of. There’s our right-hand brain, which is a freewheeling mass of creativity and imagination, while the left-hand side is more a facts-andfigures kinda guy. You know the type – good with numbers, insanely organised, not a big fan of deviating from the plan? Anyway, according to neuropsychologist Roger Sperry, most of us are either left-brained or right: realists or dreamers; maths geeks or story tellers; scientists or artists.

Tim on the other hand, well, he’s a bit of both.

“I want my work to be clearly presented, professional and minimal,” he says.

It’s a simple statement, the words of a true left-brainer, one might say. Logical, controlled, meticulous to a fault – much like the strippeddown concrete slab of an East London studio we’re standing in. And while there’s definitely something of the madcap inventor about Tim – that wispy hair, those wide inquisitive eyes – the fact is, he’s an artist. A right-brained creative who, according to Sperry’s Nobel Prize-winning research, should be thrashing around in a fit of spontaneity, not planning experiments with analytical precision.

But that’s kind of what he does. “I approach it like scientific experimentation,” explains Tim. “You’ve got an experiment, you set the parameters within which your experiment is going to take place, and then you just set it up and allow it to happen.”

Take Tim’s Tree Drawings project. The

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parameters were simple. He strapped a pen to a bunch of different trees – tall ones, short ones, great big bushy ones – hovered the pen over a pristine white canvas and then, relinquishing all artistic control, let Mother Nature do the work.

The result? A series of delicate drawings, and a weird insight into the personalities of trees.

“The weeping willow is fluid and calm, the oak is very meandering as it had a long branch that stretched right out, and the hawthorn is scratchy and kind of neurotic,” he says, staring in wonderment at his canvases as though they were created by someone else’s hand. “They’re just ordinary branches that make a drawing in the wind. But it’s that process of something being done outside of my control that’s interesting to me. It’s about putting something out into the world, and watching the world interact with it.”

With a degree in sculpture, Tim’s approach is pretty hands-on. One half of his studio (which, like cerebral matter, works better split in two) doubles as a workshop-cum-laboratory, leaving the other side clear, bar a simple desk and standard issue Mac. Giant blueprints of Inspector Gadget-style gizmos line the walls, waiting to be constructed from tools and materials categorised in piles. “I make most of the apparatus myself,” explains Tim, whose recent “creative experiment” saw him walking across London and Dartmoor with a giant kite strapped to his head. Why? So that he could be guided by the wind, obviously.

“I have a snowboarding helmet and on top of that a stainless steel metal pivot and then a carbon fibre kind of structure with an arrow at the front and a small bullet video camera at the back. Oh, and a GPS system too.” This clever little gadget, however kooky, allows Tim to create a drawing that plots the exact route he takes on one of his ‘Wind Walks’. Question is: do passers-by get that this is art? “Some people got it straight it away like, ‘Ah, he’s following the wind,’” says Tim. “Others were like, ‘What’s that guy doing?’ Some people thought it was crazy, others thought it was beautiful.”

There’s no doubting the beauty of Tim’s work; the tangible form he gives to ethereal forces beyond our reach. And though Tim admits there’s an “eccentric Englishness” to what he does, it’s metaphysics not madness that really makes him tick. “It’s trying to reveal something that is not immediately visible,” explains Tim. “Trying to transport the viewer to a process that went on beyond my control – trying to get them to decipher it and get some essence of what went on there. My creative experiments are simply a way of understanding the world, the outcome of which becomes an artwork.

Like a scientist, you’re interested to find out the results.”

And, like a man with two brains, those results are a sight to behold www.timknowles.co.uk

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Oak on Easel #1

Scots Pine on Easel #1

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Larch (4 Pen) on Easel #1

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�wedis� son�stress �arin Dreijer �ndersson return� to �he �nife with a ne� species of electro-oper�.

Words steve yates P H OTO G RA P H Y y v e s b o r gw a r d t

Sometimes she sings like a ghost, others like a banshee. Live, she hides away on a stage lit only by strategically placed standing lamps; or in total darkness, masked, behind a screen bombarded with digital projections. She shuns most of the music business’s publicity requirements, refusing to pick up awards or even appear in her own videos unless disguised beyond recognition.

With all this theatricality at play, it’s no surprise to find Karin Dreijer Andersson – aka Fever Ray and the singing half of The Knife – dipping her toe in the world of opera. A Wagnerian netherworld, maybe? Or something Italian, perhaps, with Venetian masks as worn on The Knife’s last tour? No, this most ethereal of artists is concerned with the most natural of subjects.

Natural selection, to be precise. The Knife’s first new work since their 2006 breakthrough, Silent Shout, is Tomorrow, In A Year, an opera based on Darwin’s On the Origin of Species for which they’re providing soundtrack and libretto. It’s conceived and staged by Danish company Hotel Pro Forma, who invited the Swedish electro-poppers on board.

“It’s not a story, it's more about the process of him writing On the Origin of Species (which enjoys its 150th anniversary this year), the collecting of samples, writing the notes, the thousands of letters he wrote, then putting it all together and coming to his conclusion,” Karin explains, sipping her water in a West London hotel. Typically, though, she’s located the story’s dark heart. “I think it was a way for him to revolt against his family. His father was very religious, his wife was very religious. Everyone was, except him. It

must have been very hard to do. He was a very neurotic person.

I think he suffered a lot. I’m very stuck in that part.”

Domestic matters aren’t new material for Karin. The Knife’s a family concern, just her and her brother Olof, and her solo debut as Fever Ray sounded – in those rare moments where her purposefully cryptic lyrics took distinct shape – almost like a post-natal concept album. Images abound of “dangling feet” too short to reach the floor; a trapped, sleepless woman sheltering her warm baby; a child’s dreams of adulthood.

The album was mostly written shortly after her second child was born and she says the semi-conscious state of sleepless nights, where ideas are fleeting and thoughts are more like shadows, is the most creatively fertile. “A lot of stories come from that world, like daydreaming, but tired. I try to write when I'm in that state, I’m very bad at remembering later, so I have to do it right away.”

She’s getting out more now, taking Fever Ray on a startling European tour, but also taking in Sweden’s prolific death metal scene for research purposes. “It cares a lot about the visual aspect of their music, how they dress out and how they perform,” she says ungrammatically (though she sings in English, she speaks it haltingly). “Now that I’m becoming more interested in live performances I look at others and see how they do it.

When you have a live show you have the possibilities to create something.” She might move in mysterious ways, but Karin Dreijer Andersson’s tale is one of striking evolution. Darwin would’ve approved

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Farm House, by

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nal School, Oslo Internatio MNAL. AS Arkitekter s æ sn Vig d/

by Jarmun

If you say to most people, 'Norwegian architecture', they’ll think of a hillside cottage made of brightly coloured planks of timber. If you say 'Norwegian architecture' to an architect though, they’ll think of Sverre Fehn, winner of the Pritzker Prize – the award held in greatest esteem by the architectural profession – and designer of the Nordic Pavilion in Venice.

Fehn, who passed away in February 2009, was Norway’s link back to the great days of European architecture. He worked for the French designer Jean Prouve and was a friend of Le Corbusier.

To many of Norway’s young architects, he’s the daddy. Not only did he teach at Oslo School of Architecture for twenty years, but he showed in his own work how to make Norwegian architecture modern, and modern architecture Norwegian.

Einar Jarmund and Håkon Vigsnæs met whilst studying at Oslo under Fehn, with Vigsnæs later working for the old master. Working today as JVA (Jarmund/Vigsnæs AS Arkitekter MNAL), they learned from him that you had to respond to the world around you. “Every commission should be unique with reference to its site and circumstances,” says Jarmund. From Fehn, they have also clearly learned the power of material.

“I have spent my life running away from wood!” said Fehn, who was known for juxtaposing wood with bricks, concrete and steel. And JVA have gone even further, going to town with some really innovative and unexpected materials. Approach the International School in Oslo from the street, and you will see organically shaped walls covered with fibre cement boards in ten different colours.

Like strips of synthetic candy, they mark an exciting contrast with the curved elevation to the rear, which is clad in a specially milled wooden paneling.

A small house overlooking Lake Mjøsa shows how the practice can work with wood on its own.

An existing barn had to be torn down, but the cladding of the barn, more than one-hundred years old and still of good quality, was re-used in the exterior cladding of the new house. With its

upper loft for children and views for the academic parents to contemplate as they read, the Farm House was a perfect cosy option.

But like Fehn before them, JVA aren’t interested in simply regurgitating comfortable ideas about their country’s traditions. At the same time as they were building the Farm House, the practice were creating an even more daring proposition – the Edge House, located at Kolbotn, a suburb south of Oslo. A young couple bought the challenging site, with eight-metres height difference from the access road, and wanted a house that “looked like you could shoot a James Bond movie in it.” And that’s exactly what they got.

The western part of the site is flat, but the building is placed along the eastern perimeter, suspended above the slope on slender steel columns. Edgy it is indeed. But, having worked in severely cold climates, JVA’s catchphrase is ‘think practical’. Not only does the overhang avoid blasting into the rock but it gives the groovy owners a large flat garden, for the times when looking good just won’t cut it and the little ones need somewhere to run about.

“Nothing is exact or direct… situations are not cut and dried,” said Fehn. JVA have learned a lot from him.

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Project, rg Housing Helsingbo mson Arkitekter.

by Wilhel

Wilhelmson

The city of Kiruna will disappear into the earth if it is not moved. For over a hundred years, the national Swedish mining company LKAB has been removing magnetite ore from a seam that reaches under the centre of the city, which sits outside the Arctic Circle. With subsidence beginning to affect housing, the decision was made to move the town and, having won an international competition, the job was given to the Swedish architect Anders Wilhelmson. He describes his role there as being ‘a mediator’ not just between the town and the mining company, but the town and central government. “It’s like being a marriage guidance counsellor or a divorce lawyer,” he says. It is an improbable act of planning – dragging a model town founded by a mining company in 1900 away from the mine that is now consuming it.

Wilhelmson’s plan redefines the city as a series of distinct lozenges that will flow around the lake.

Most of the buildings in Kiruna will simply be torn down and rebuilt at the target site. However, the Kiruna city hall, the most architecturally significant building in Kiruna, will be cut into four parts, each of which will be transported whole to the target site and reassembled there. The move will require a totally flat road, tens of metres wide, and will be extremely slow.

It may seem strange that Wilhelmson, considered Sweden’s most progressive architect, should be working on a site that is so far away from an urban centre. Cities tend to be the places where the most radical architecture has occurred. In Sweden this is not the case. Perhaps because it is a precious

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heritage site, in Stockholm new building styles are discouraged. “In Sweden we have an architectural consensus that our houses should look modern rather than contemporary. Wilhelmson tends to be contemporary. We have nice clients but they have a hard time getting us through approval,” he says.

“We tend to work either in the north of Sweden or the south.”

Several years ago Wilhelmson completed a twenty-five-unit housing co-operative in Helsingborg. The project is an open-ended figure of eight with thirty houses, clad in corrugated metal on the inner face, coiling like a snake around a landscaped courtyard and opening up to the countryside through walls of glass on the outer face. The corrugated zinc cladding on the front of the housing changes colour from grey to blue depending on the weather. However, it’s the only really innovative work in an otherwise conventional suburb.

Helsingborg is far more sympathetic to Wilhelmson’s approach than the capital. And Wilhelmson has made an impact there. He is a member of the Saab creative team and is responsible for their exhibitions, launches and showrooms, not just in Stockholm but throughout the world. He’s also a professor of architecture at the Royal College of Technology in Stockholm where he teaches progressive courses in master planning. As an architect however, his imagination is clearly better suited to the wide open spaces of Sweden’s north rather than the city, where conservation is the priority.

Fantastic Norway There is a far more liberal attitude to design qualification in Norway than elsewhere in Europe.

And no one has taken greater advantage of this than Erlend Haffner and Håkon Matre Aasarød, who have been working together as Fantastic Norway since they dropped out of Bergen School of Architecture in 2003. The pair of self-starters weren’t dropping out of architecture completely – rather, they were itching to turn their third year degree project into reality.

Together with artists they met, they lobbied local authorities in Brønnøysund to stop a crude redevelopment and offer an arts centre as an alternative. Some five years later, their project is finally happening – a great achievement for the young practice who were heavily involved in drumming up the funding and local political support. They are happy, but as Haffner says, “it also drives us crazy to see that it takes such a long time with architecture.”

The structure Fantastic Norway are most closely associated with in the architecture world

is not an arts centre, or even a house, but a caravan parked outside the Italian Pavilion during the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008. As an emerging practice eager to get started, Fantastic Norway got into their caravan, travelled around the country to small towns, and as they put it, “invaded local power structures.” They did their homework and found out what the towns really needed, but also schmoozed local politicians and planners. This wasn’t always popular. In one northern town, their caravan was shot at repeatedly, but Brønnøysund shows that this tactic pays off. Eventually.

So it is a welcome revelation that they can also design one-off domestic properties – another staple of young practices. The client for Cabin Vardehaugen was a family with grown-up kids, who wanted a second home for vacations. It stands in a remote coastal area around two hours drive from Trondheim and is built on solid rock.

Concrete runs all along the outer walls to prevent wind flowing freely under the cabin. In extreme

conditions, the wind could actually lift the whole house off its base. The wood, meanwhile, is treated with a traditional Norwegian staining treatment called ‘beis’ – a semi-transparent thin oil in brown or black that goes into the wood like a marinade.

In June 2009, Fantastic Norway also made their presence in the city. At the Centre for Design and Architecture in Oslo, the practice constructed a sustainable ‘Cardboard Cloud’ installation - a pavilion made of crates that were donated for free and which will be returned to the donor at the end of the year. They are also exploring an ingenious idea for improving hotel foyers, in order to create a meeting point between tourists and locals in Norway’s small towns. “We are interested in how you can open the remote places up for meetings between locals and visitors in a natural way. How you can use activities that are already going on to generate meetings between people. It will also give the hotels a larger economic base,” says Erlend. Fantastic, indeed.

Cabin Vardehaug en,

by Fantastic Norw ay.

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an and Ulla Alberts.

The Juniper House, by Hans Murm Photography Ă…ke E:son Lindman

Murman At the beginning of the 1980s, Hans Murman designed a small settlement called Fjällbyn in the Swedish ski resort of Ramundberget. Throughout the 1970s, the development of the Swedish ski industry had thrown up a number of ski resorts modelled on resorts in the Alps: big roofs and broad gabled chalet-style buildings – larger ones for the hotels, smaller ones for the wealthy. Murman, however, thought that this style of building didn’t reflect his native country. Fjällbyn took inspiration from the traditional farm buildings of northern Sweden – small squared rows of houses. “By following the land slope it was possible to create a natural variation in the buildings,” says Murman.

He helped the Swedes understand that while tourism can destroy what makes a place special, it also provides an opportunity to celebrate.

Murman is a true pioneer of environmental architecture. In 1980 he asked his project manager to discuss new ways to save trees and vegetation with their builders and fortunately their contractor was as forward-thinking as they were. Roofs of the Fjällbyn chalets were covered with turf and the wooden facades were treated to make them go grey as they aged. “Entrances, vestibules and windows are painted in strong colors that contrast with the grey earth-coloured facade,” says Murman. As he puts it, “unspoilt nature remained on the doorstep.” It felt like a unique place rather than a dormitory.

If anything, Murman’s ability to create architecture that is simultaneously a part of the Swedish landscape and apart from it, has grown

more pronounced. Slotted alongside the tree line in the Ramundberget ski resort is the conical Restaurang Tusen, a ski restaurant lined with birch trunks that gazes over the mountain terrain as far as the eye can see. Snowfall camouflages the tepee structure creating a synergy between the facade and the landscape. “In this unique and sensitive context we wanted a building in harmony with nature, all year round, day and night,” explains Murman.

Yet nowhere has Murman achieved this to such powerful effect as the Juniper House on the island of Gotland. The house is a holiday home for Murman and his partner Ulla Alberts and sits in the same compound as other, more traditional holiday homes owned by the Alberts family. The family was sceptical about what the architects would come up with. What they created was something that was true to their progressive principles, whilst being a cheeky way to hide the building amidst the surrounding juniper trees.

A photo of the existing junipers was printed onto a tailor-made piece of vinyl fabric, thirty-five metres wide and three metres high. This was then wrapped onto a galvanized steel structure which sits forty centimetres from the facade on three sides.

On the north and south side of the house the cloth is extended for privacy and to hide the outdoor shower. On the side of the kitchen, walls fold down to create a wooden verandah. When the wall is raised, the house all but disappears. “When the hatch is open we’re inviting people in. When it is closed the house is just for us,” says Murman

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�i�-mountain sk� champio� Aurélien �ucroz takes t� the sea�. w o r d s E D A N DR E WS P H OTO G R A P H Y M A X H A M I LTO N

It’s in our nature to be adaptable, but some are more so than others. Take French big-mountain ski champion Aurélien Ducroz. Whether he’s braving cold, snow-tipped mountains or counteracting the turbulence of the open sea, there aren’t many environments he cannot master. But while in London promoting the Nissan Freeride World Tour, the twenty-seven-year-old skier – small, laidback and wild-haired – cuts a strikingly different figure to your average city dweller.

Born and bred in the Alpine Mecca of Chamonix, and descended from six generations of mountain guides, skiing is very much in Ducroz’s blood. Having conquered the hill at a young age, he moved onto the crowd-pleasing spectacle of ski jumping in 1996, going on to become French Junior Champion three times and represent France at numerous World Cups.

But something wasn’t right. Eager to leave the rules behind, Ducroz turned his attention to bigmountain freeriding. “I suppose ski jumping helped me a bit because I was used to hitting a jump at ninety kilometres an hour, so riding at speed was never a problem,” he reflects. “But apart from that, there is no connection between ski jumping and freeriding. With ski jumping, there’s the ski federation [FIS] and all the rules, blah, blah, blah,” he says with disdain. “I moved from that because I was tired of that system.”

He may have escaped the system, but competition was still in his blood. And it wasn’t long before Ducroz notched up a string of wins at freeride events, including being crowned overall winner of the 2009 Nissan Freeride World Tour.

But for every winner, there’s a whole host of losers – so how, exactly, do the boundaries of competition fit with the freedom of backcountry lines? “Ah, but every sport needs a champion

to progress,” he says, pragmatically. “We have to do competitions because in Europe there isn’t a huge ski DVD market. You can’t make a living just filming freeriding.” It also seems that such competitions are far removed from the rigid structures of the FIS. “It is just you and a mountain. You are free to do whatever you want, ski wherever you like. So the mentality of the competition respects the nature of freeriding.”

As a true mountain man, there’s something curious about Ducroz’s other passion – sailing.

After a stint as a ‘Godfather’ with the French sailing team a few summers back, he now plans to tackle the 6.50 Transat in 2011. This punishing solo race takes place every two years from CharenteMaritime in France to Salvador de Bahia in Brazil and involves chartering a six-and-a-half-metre yacht, with no communication and no motor.

The wide-open sea and the vertiginous mountains can seem at odds with one other.

But Ducroz prefers to focus on what his two passions have in common. “The first thing I felt when I was on the boat was the slide,” he says, gesturing as he speaks. “It’s almost like sliding on snow, but sliding even faster! I have the same feeling when I’m out in the boat as when I hike up the mountains. There’s also nobody around, it’s just you exposed to the elements.”

And it seems that the similarities do not end there. “Skiers and sailors tend to live the same way,” says Ducroz. “Skiers say that the sea is dangerous but then sailors think that the mountains are way worse. But whether you are on a sixty-degree mountain face or floating in the middle of the Atlantic, you must listen to nature because, really, you are not supposed to be there. If you make a mistake, you can be totally screwed.”

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�kateboarding’s life story may be drenched in Californi� cool, but the sidewalk surfer tells just one side of the tale. �his is skateboarding history, through a �ew York City len�.

W o r d s J ay R i g g i o P h o t o g r a pH Y N a t e B r e s s l e r

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Andy Kessler

ew York City. It’s a giant, forever expanding metropolis of unsettled sounds, opposing seasons, intersecting cultures, organised chaos, sky-high hopes and broken, aching dreams. Its history is colourful, far from brief and, when it comes to the ever-changing culture of skateboarding, more than often a little misunderstood.

It’s difficult to imagine a time when New York City wasn’t at the forefront of skateboarding.

But, just fifteen years ago, this concrete Mecca had yet to solidify its reputation as one of the best skate terrains in the world. Before that, East Coast skateboarding had a tough-as-hell time making its way onto the West Coast radar, existing as its own entity, completely unknown to the skateboarding scene in California.

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Rodney Smith

The 1960s saw an explosion of skateboarding up and down the West Coast. The skate boom, which began as a natural extension of surfing when waves were a no-show, was propelled by the mass production of skateboards. Over the years, hard goods became widely available across the States, reaching as far as New York City, a land foreign to waves, surf culture and this strange new plank on four wheels. While the rest of California adapted their surfing abilities to skateboarding, Andy Kessler, considered to be one of Manhattan’s first skateboarders, saw his board as nothing more than a mode of transportation.

“A friend of mine, we had one skateboard between the two of us,” explains Kessler. “One cat would ride the skateboard while the other dude would ride the Schwinn Stingray and tow the other guy around like a water ski.” It went on like this for years – the two pioneers upgrading from metal to clay wheels, but never thinking of skateboards as anything more than glorified toys.

It wasn’t until 1974, when urethane wheels were introduced to the market, that Kessler’s world was changed forever.

“I ran into some kid on my block, on the Upper West Side, whose name was Adam Dissen.

He had a little fibreglass skateboard with urethane wheels. That was the first time I ever saw a board like that,” Kessler recalls. “I saw him kickturning around this grate on our street corner and I was completely blown out of the fucking water! It blew my mind. When I saw that he was able to lift his front wheels and propel himself around without pushing, doing 360s and wheelies and other shit, I just couldn’t believe it.”

With the extinction of metal and clay wheels and the introduction of urethane, the unforgiving and rugged New York streets were now much more accessible. For the first time ever, Andy could roll over pebbles, take harder turns without sliding out and disregard street cracks that were once capable of taking him down hard. Though skateboarding had permeated some parts of Manhattan, you could barely call it a community.

“At the time there were four of us,” says Kessler.

“Four skaters. You can’t even call that a scene.

It was my friend Adam and Gilbert and two brothers and that was it. There were no other skateboarders in New York City.”

The miniscule crew stuck together, riding the hills of Central Park, searching out smooth pavement to practise freestyle on, investigating embankments to carve. They’d congregate at Washington Square Park to jump garbage cans and push through Midtown searching for anything out of the ordinary. They even skated the now famous bubble banks way back then.

Then came a sea change. The re-launch of Skateboarder Magazine in 1975 spawned an entirely new movement in skating. For Kessler and friends, a new world suddenly opened up and skateboarding, as they knew it, became larger than life. “When I opened the pages of Skateboarder Magazine, I was blown away. The shit people were doing in the magazine was completely alien to me, but it was something I wanted to do,” remembers Kessler. Around this time, skateboards became widely available in the city and suddenly it seemed like every kid up and down Manhattan owned a skateboard. By 1977, the influence Skateboarder Magazine had on New York began to show. The mag contained pictures of California skaters riding empty pools, unwittingly pioneering transition skateboarding. So, naturally, New York kids wanted to do the same. “We started building ramps and finding pools up in Riverdale, in the Bronx,” Kessler recalls. “Back then, it seemed like year round they were never filled.”

Then things went quiet. In 1981 Andy went away to college for a year, and when he returned the New York scene was deader than dead. “I’d say from 1980 through ’83 there wasn’t squat going on with skateboarding in New York City,” says Kessler. But, thankfully, a new generation of skaters was already emerging, hungry to put New York on the map.

For starters, there was fourteen-year-old Rodney Smith who, around 1983, began commuting from his native state of New Jersey to Manhattan with a skateboard in tow. “New York was just the spot because there were still some stores like Paragon and similar places that still carried skateboards,” he says. One day, Rodney and a friend stumbled upon Washington Square Park, which at the time was the main spot for skaters around the city. It was there that he came across NYC legends Bruno Musso, Pepe Torres, Ian Frahm and others pushing around.

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“Skateboarding was in its dark days then. Any time you saw a skater, it was like seeing fucking Bigfoot,” laughs Smith, who later went on to found Shut Skateboards and Zoo York. “When you saw a skater riding down the street, you had to go up and talk to them. That was your duty.” Without hesitation, they approached the skaters and a tight-knit crew was formed. Oblivious to their place in the history books, these unwitting innovators would go on to pioneer street skating in New York.

“The cool thing about it was when you saw a street shot you didn’t really refer to it as a street shot,” remembers Rodney. “My first memory from Skateboarder Magazine was Steve Olson Sr. doing a layback, cutback on street. You didn’t know if he was going fast or pulling a 360 with his hands down, but it just looked cool as shit. It was like, ‘That counts?’ We thought it was only about skate parks and ramps. And all of a sudden you see this pro rider and he’s out doing a pivotal slide thing on the street.”

It was moments like this that inspired the New York crew who existed as outsiders far away from the skate homeland of California. Obed Rios, an original Shut team member and owner of Brooklyn skateshop, OBEDNYC, remembers the communication barrier back then. “You would look at the mags hoping you were doing a trick right. It’s crazy – at one point I thought I invented a trick, but it was already being done.”

The crew would take trips to all parts of the city in search of new terrain. The Brooklyn banks, the Harlem banks, a pool up in Spanish Harlem, the 23rd Street banks and the Marriot banks were just some of the spots regularly hit up by the mobile skate crew. The city was a different place back then and many of the best spots existed in the most dangerous neighbourhoods.

“No average kid, unless you were with a posse of skaters, would even dare go up to Harlem,” remembers Rodney. “It was super sketchy. And they loved it when we’d show up because it was target practice for them. They’d be whipping bottles down from the tenement houses, but we’d go back the next week, anyway, ready to battle.” Obed Rios’ memories confirm just how gnarly those days were. “We used to go to the Lefrak pool, which was at these crazy projects in Queens, and there’d be people throwing

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bottles out of windows at us and we’d still be skating, in between bottles. It wasn’t even a big deal.”

In 1986, Rodney Smith and Bruno Musso became fed up with inadequate boards. Though sponsored, they still broke board after board – a product that was designed for vert, not the demanding street terrain they were skating. Their frustration led to the birth of Shut Skateboards, the third skate company ever to emerge from the East Coast. Shut began with Smith and Musso handcutting blanks, which they sanded and painted themselves. A team of solid East Coast skaters was assembled with legends like Coco Santiago, Sean Sheffey, Barker Barrett, Jeff Pang, Obed Rios and ex-Dogtown pro, Jeremy Henderson. Shut product evolved fairly quickly, a distribution deal was met and suddenly there was a demand for Shut boards in skate shops everywhere.

Without running a single advertisement, the Shut name and New York City attitude began to reach California, leaving the West Coast industry heavyweights coveting the secret to their success.

So significant were the shockwaves that one day Rodney received a call from Thrasher and Independent founder, Fausto Vitello. “Fausto was like, ‘Can I ask you guys how you’re doing it?’” laughs Smith. “So I explained to him what was happening and he couldn’t believe that we were doing it the same way it was done in the ’70s and were actually getting away with it.”

Then came the call from Brad Dorfman – owner of Vision Skateboards, one of the biggest brands of the day – offering one million dollars to buy the brand. Realising they were onto a good thing, Smith and Musso hastily declined.

As a New York brand, Shut was taking away from West Coast sales – something no one could have ever foreseen – and slowly the balance started being redressed. New York City talent was getting noticed as well. Shut rider Coco Santiago was making regular trips out to California, blowing minds with his natural skill and style. While there, he’d spread the word about his fellow East Coasters and how they skated better than him.

Suddenly, everything began to happen fast for New York kids. The city’s burgeoning street culture – a heady fusion of skateboarding, hip hop, graffiti and punk rock – fuelled a wild era of invention

Obed Rios

and change. West Coast pros like John Grigley, Mark Gonzales, Lance Mountain and Steve Olson were making regular trips to skate Manhattan, linking up with the Shut crew in order to get a tour of the city’s best spots. Hell, Mayor Dinkins even designated the Brooklyn banks an official spot for skaters. Youth culture had arrived, and it was distinctly East Coast in flavour.

Then the ’90s rolled around and things began to change. Shut ran into legal trouble with a third partner, causing it to disband within a year. New York’s top skaters took up California sponsors and many even relocated. Others faded into obscurity.

But like all rites of passage, the gauntlet was soon passed on to a new generation of skaters who, thanks to their predecessors, had the doors of the industry open to them. “There were a lot of kids that did not recognise that there was any effort put into skating before they arrived,” says Smith.

Determined to put things right, Rodney went on to found Zoo York Skateboards with Eli Gezner in 1993. By 1995, New York City skateboarding was a common occurrence, receiving more magazine and video coverage from the skate media than ever before. Today, the scene in New York is bigger and better than ever, and the city remains a regular destination for pros around the globe.

And, adamant that history should not be forgotten, Rodney even brought back Shut Skateboards in 2006. “To this day I want to make sure that every kid coming through our channels is clued into the history of skateboarding so that they can properly represent the East Coast,” he says proudly.

As skateboarding continues to evolve and grow to seismic proportions, it still comes as a shock to many of the pioneers that New York managed to break through the once guarded West Coast scene. “Sometimes I cannot believe how far it’s come,” says Kessler, disbelief flooding his words.

“From seeing my friend Adam doing a kickturn to seeing fucking thousands of kids skate down the street for Go Skateboarding Day – now there are people making millions of dollars skateboarding.

There was no way that we could see that coming.

We were just happy to be skateboarding.”

In memory of Andy Kessler, who passed away on August 10 2009, after a heart attack induced by an allergic reaction to a wasp sting suffered near

Montauk, New York.

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�h� �ilenc� o��wiligh� photography Michael KENNA

Day turns to night, turns back into day. It’s the simplest of truths, the only certainty in life.

Darkness flirts with daylight, and daylight teases dark, before obliterating the other to reign from way up high. And so they go on, dancing as they do in this never-ending dance, like lovers who cannot live together, but alone would never last. Yet in that fraction of the continuum when the lovers are entwined, there’s a moment of silence imperceptible to anyone but a man behind a camera who hears it as it breaks. Twilight. Then day turns to night, turns back into day.

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Michael Kenna Venezia is on at Robert Mann Gallery, New York, from January 14 - March 13, 2010.

�ha� �wedis� �tyl� �artin �öderströ� an� �S Bikes are � marria�e made in mountain bikin� heave�.

W o r d s e d a n d r e ws photography Immanuel Meier

“I’m not really scared of getting hurt. I’m not the kind of guy to just do something that I don’t know I can do,” says mountain biker Martin Söderström.

At just nineteen years old, the rider from Uppsala, Sweden has already firmly established himself in the premier league of mountain biking.

Across all disciplines – dirt, slopestyle and street – he’s killing it. In 2009 alone, he claimed the top of the podium at a whole load of European competitions including the Vienna Air King, Big in Bavaria, Austrian King of Dirt and The IXS Dirt Masters in Winterberg, Germany. And to top off a stellar season, he also finished third in slopestyle at the prestigious Crankworx 2009 competition in Whistler, Canada. Not bad, considering that, at his young age, he’s still classed as a ‘rookie’.

But where some riders see competitions as a necessary evil, Martin embraces any opportunity to impress a crowd. “Winning is really important,” he says coolly. “That’s why I ride a mountain bike.

I want to show people what I can do – it’s what got me sponsored in the first place.”

So is this desire to win a classic case of youthful over-exuberance; a love of attention perhaps?

Talking to Martin, it seems to be something more.

There is a calm confidence about him, his style and consistency when riding a bike appears calculated, almost masterful – no reckless huckand-hope mentality here. His secret?

“I practise a lot,” he says simply. “I think that’s my strong side, I keep on practising the tricks that I know I can do, so that I know I can do them anywhere. Other riders do a new trick once and then think ‘I can do it now.’”

Perhaps Martin’s onto something. Rather than practising a trick until he does it right, he practises until he can’t do it wrong. Don’t believe it? Then watch the many videos of Martin populating YouTube or the Red Bull documentary released in February and his smooth, effortless style will

convince you otherwise. Tailwhips, barspins and nosestalls come thick and fast. As tricks all pioneered in the BMX world, it’s little surprise that, to the untrained eye, the two sports are often likened to one another – with the only difference being that mountain bikes just seem, well, bigger.

How does Martin explain the (very real) difference to those not in the know?

“It’s a totally different sport,” he says. “BMX is very technical but we take bigger risks. What we do really is a combination of BMX and FMX, it’s the way we want the sport to be.”

Bigger jumps and bigger tricks demand a greater level of engineering in his bikes because, as Söderström remarks, “you can’t ride a slopestyle course on a BMX.” A few years ago Martin got sponsored by NS Bikes, a Polish company with a reputation for producing cutting-edge mountain bikes. “They are taking a lot of ideas from BMX and putting them into mountain bikes, really cool stuff,” says Martin enthusiastically who was riding NS Bikes long before they sponsored him. “I really like to ride light bikes but now the jumps are getting bigger, I have to choose between weight and safety.

Luckily, NS Bikes are doing really good things that are really light but on the right side of safety. I haven’t broken anything yet.”

His excitement is shared by NS Bikes’ Szymon Kobylinski: “What is really special about Martin is his flow and consistency. It seems that even the biggest tricks that he pulls off are a piece of cake.

I rarely see Martin trying something that he is not ninety-nine per cent sure he can land. Or at least it looks like that!”

With that Swedish style and that Polish technical prowess, this is one marriage at least that looks set to last www.ns-bikes.com

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�treet culture pundit �ing Adz ventures t� the promised land to tak� in the sights and sounds of � subterranean Tel �viv.

Words KING ADZ P h o t o g r ap h y G U Y P I T C HO N

t was the usual farce before I left: people talking shit in my ear about a place they’d never been, regurgitating the bullshit they’d gleaned from the media about war, terror and oppression, and the need to know who, what, when, where and why. As usual, I blanked the fuckers and got on the plane excited about a trip to someplace I’d never been and knew little about, with a pocket full of Shekels and the tools of my trade in my rucksack.

Check List Airline Ticket Thompson Air (£182) Accommodation Pilpeled’s Herzliya Apartment (Free) Car 1996 Mitsubishi Pajero (Black)

Tel Aviv is a small city and after a five-hour flight my host, local street artist Pilpeled, picks me up at Ben Gurion airport and treats me to a driveby of the city en route to his bachelor pad.

Geographically, Tel Aviv may be in Israel, but it’s a fucking oasis of cool street shit in a mad ol’ land.

Unlike the rest of this ancient and divided country, it has its own unique state of mind.

There has always been serious street culture coming out of Tel Aviv. It’s just that most of it doesn’t reach across the Med, and is bounced back instead because of closed minds and negative spin. The party scene has been killer for the last fifteen years, beginning with trance and

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rave and mutating into drum‘n’bass and dubstep right now. And the street art is still fresh off the kerb. So that’s why I’m here – for the innovation, the love, the people and the talent, not the bullshit politics or mind-numbing debates that the very mention of Israel seems to provoke with every ill-informed crusty.

As we drive into town a long line of brandspanking new skyscrapers rolls by. “You see! Told ya, it’s not a desert!” shouts Pilpeled, having a jab at the fact I asked if my cell phone would work out here. The sheer size of the developments and money being invested in the place is jawdropping. It’s a good sign, on the one hand, and a bad one on the other. Money means prosperity and a good economy for people to buy the products produced by the talents I love. But it also means rising property prices and gentrification of areas that were once Bohemian havens – just like the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the exodus of the artists-in-residence to Williamsburg.

After dropping my bags off we head to a bar that would be too cool for Berlin. A DJ is rocking the non-existent Sunday night crowd and we hook up with local DJ/promoter Walter Einstein Frog, who is also one third of hip hop act Cohen@Mushon. Soon, the boys spark up the obligatory chronic and the smoke begins to rise.

No one in the place bats an eyelid. I get a grip on how the club scene is run (totally hands-on) and as Walter has a party on Friday, I’m already on the list. I ask about the public consumption of ganja and discover that if you’re not sparking up in front of the old bill or the army, it’s all good.

It’s midnight when we schlep back to Pilpeled’s jeep, past a kid sat on the kerb with his laptop, jacking someone’s WiFi like it’s the most normal thing to be doing on a Sunday night. Pilpeled spots me clocking the kid. “Welcome to Tel Aviv!” he laughs as we pass by. y first morning proper and I’m stoked to be alive. We mooch out of the apartment and drive into town to watch the place come alive. There are coffee kiosks everywhere, people chilling and chatting in the wide reservations under the sun, kids sporting dreads and skaters galore. Sub-cultures are still important round these parts – which is a seriously good indicator of the psyche of a place.

This is how I imagine Beirut must have been before

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it fell. And there is no sign of trouble. It’s one of the most laidback places I’ve ever been – the polar opposite of LA – an authentic Bohemia where individuality reigns supreme. The only reminder that I’m in Israel is the occasional soldier strolling nonchalantly by packing some serious firepower – toasters galore, as they say in BKLYN. I elect to not take any photos, as they seem a little ‘camera shy’.

For lunch we go for a kosher burger (a fucking 1/2 pounder in a loaf of bread) and then meet up with local hottest-artist-in-Israel, Know Hope, who is a major dude. Born in Huntington Beach, California, he made the exodus from surf-town suburbia to the promised land when he was ten.

“It was quite the culture shock at first but, as time went by and the ‘contrast and compare game’ ended, I made good friends and felt at home here,” he says, openly. “Tel Aviv is the only place I could live contently in Israel.”

He’s a serious talent who takes his work seriously. “I deal a lot with the ideas of temporality and the ephemeral aspect of everything around us, including ourselves. From the timely conversations to the supposedly timeless gestures, it is all a fraction in some general ever-changing continuum. I want to create that momentary contact, that minor conversation… a future memory… proof that a moment did exist.” he next day Pilpeled and I drive to the city of Haifa – 90kms north of Tel Aviv – and on the way I discover another side to this country: palm trees and new-build housing projects, a beautiful coast lined with huge houses for the rich and farms growing every produce imaginable. We pass petrol stations serviced by people ready to pump your gas, and state-of-the-art shopping malls and entertainment complexes. We’re going to Haifa to hang out with the Broken Fingaz, a multi-faceted, multi-talented, young and restless art/music crew, who virtually run the street scene in Haifa single-handedly. And after I marvel at their cool-as-sin shop in the mixed Massada area, they take me to the Arab part of town for some killer hummus.

Haifa is like the Brighton of Israel and has an even more laidback atmosphere than Tel Aviv. It’s on the side of Mount Carmel and has the shortest metro system in the world, the Carmelit. The cost of living here is low. You can rent a decent three-bed apartment with killer sea views for like £400 a

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Pilpeled

from our heroes – A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Beastie Boys – to bring back an element of fun. But that’s not to say that we don’t take it seriously. We don’t do it as a joke. We take our fun seriously.”

“In Israel you cannot live from music alone, which is sad,” explains Walter who, as a full-time DJ/promoter, is credited with putting on Tel Aviv’s first dubstep night. “Cohen edits the music section of Time Out Tel Aviv, Mushon is an actor. I’m the only one really living off music. In the day I have this hip hop and reggae alter-ego and by night I go out to raves with crazy bass lines.” spend the day exploring the different parts of Tel Aviv proper and Pilpeled takes me to eat a Sabich (a pita stuffed with fried eggplant, hard boiled eggs, potato, salad, humus and tahini), the first of many, as they taste like nothing else.

“Each place has its own twist, adds its own secret ingredients,” Pil tells me, after I’ve scoffed the lot.

We then stroll to a coffee shop that is a total throwback to Goa. Geezers sit around playing

chess under the palms in the courtyard beside a bookshelf in the corner; people roll joints, while young couples canoodle, oblivious to anything except each other. Everyone is happy as Larry, everything existing in harmony.

That night, having just done his first cover for Time Out, Pilpeled is up all night waiting for the courier to deliver the first copies. So after a rather late start, we spend the next afternoon with Guy Pitchon, an amazing skate and street photographer who has been documenting the Israeli scene for the last ten years. This is where it begins to work for me – seeking out the fresh and the free, the unknown but obscenely talented.

“I usually shoot my own world, where I feel comfortable and can find real moments rather than a bunch of people acting to the camera,” explains Guy. “I always think that if I was a really good skater I’d just do it and not shoot it. But that’s the way the cookie crumbled, and I’m glad I can go on doing my thing for a long time, and not just until my knees cave in. My work in other medias, like drawing and such, is usually about all the bad

Cohen@Mushon

month, so the scene round here is youthful and fresh.

“In the area where we live [Massada],” explains Gon of the Broken Fingaz, “Jews and Arabs don’t just live side-by-side – we have a single community, you know. Artists of all kinds come to hang out here and there are no problems. We all live and work together. It’s a fucking cool place, for sure.”

We hit the road and make it back to Tel Aviv in time to meet up with Cohen@Mushon – the most original and talented hip hop act in Israel. Their videos and personas remind me of how the Beastie Boys were in the ’80s – only way cooler. And to top it off, the trio (Michael Cohen, Michael Mushonov and DJ Walter Einstein Frog) are some of the most humble and likeable guys I’ve ever met (a recurring theme over this side). I film an interview and the boys have an infectious sense of joy about them, a rare thing indeed in the rap game.

“It was very important for us to put some humour in our music because when we started out Israeli hip hop really took itself seriously, and was very political, very heavy-headed,” says Cohen.

“We needed to add some of that humour we had

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things and sadness in the world – but not in a dark way. Death and violence is an integral part of our world. I’m trying to talk about it and show it, but not really actively change anything.”

From one talent to another, we leave Guy to meet up with Read, a street artist who is still studying graphics. We swing by his apartment when he’s finished classes for the day to check out his work. “I’m not doing much street work these days as I have too much college work,” he tells me. This is the new breed coming up from the street. This guy was born in the 1980s and is half my age. But we still connect as our hearts are both in the street gutter, and I like his can-do attitude.

Refreshing after all the ‘Big I Am’ posturing that is de rigueur for a lot of up-and-coming street artists in Europe. Read is no talk and all trousers.

“It always surprises people who are not from Israel to hear this, but for me the best thing about growing up in Tel Aviv is the freedom,” he says.

“From a pretty young age I remember walking around the city going to bars and clubs I was way too young to be in, and just having complete

freedom and independence to come and go and figure things out for yourself… basically being able to live an exposed and unsheltered life as a kid, both culturally and socially.

“One thing I would say about being an artist in Tel Aviv is that some people are a bit close-minded when it comes to things that are different from what they are used to,” continues Read. “It seems to be changing, but the visual scenery in Israel can get a little monotonous. So I guess when trying to create art you strive to do something different, but people don’t always necessarily get it. Then again, that might just be me and my art!” y last night in town and we go to get a burger in Herzliya – the Beverly Hills of Tel Aviv. “I never go out here,” says Pilpeled, even though it’s where he lives. “It’s not my kind of place – no freaks, geeks or losers!” Sure enough, there isn’t an outsider in sight – just rich kids in designer clothes, having ‘fun’ to the techno-pop soundtrack of this super-slick burger bar. It’s a world away from the

down-and-dirty places we frequented this week but, despite the sparkle, something is missing from this side of town. Round here, people prefer to stay firmly inside the bubble and, much like the ‘right side’ of Cape Town or LA, money talks and poverty walks (on by).

Surrounded by the yin to Tel Aviv’s street yang, Pilpeled begins to tell me about his time in the army and, for the first time, I begin to understand a little about the contradiction of life in Israel.

“I was enlisted into the army as a fighter in the Haruv unit and it was one of the hardest times in my life,” he says. “All I remember is non-stop angst.

I suffer from being locked away, being like a robot.

I couldn’t handle not having my freedom. After that year, I appreciate life so much more. I thank God every day for where I was born and raised, and for the people I’ve met here. Tel Aviv is always growing in huge steps, which makes you want for more.

It’s a non-stop city – small and developed but with all kinds of people, most of them are creative and some just love the action. I wouldn’t be what I am today if I had grown up in a different place.”

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�or som� it’s a hobby, for others � professio�, bu� for �on �lsson skiin� is the tota� raison d’êtr�.

Words Shelley Jones Photography Mattias Fredriksson

“All we did was ski,” says freeski superstar, alpine racer and competition organiser Jon Olsson about his childhood. “My only goal in life was to become the best skier in the world.”

It sounds like the kind of thing every kid dreams about before growing up and swapping airtime for overtime, but for the floppy-haired shredder from Sweden the dream is something of a reality.

“I am the happiest when I feel that I am trying my best,” he says. “And of course when you land a double flip off a huge jump and look up to the heli and get the thumbs-up from the filmer – that’s a pretty incredible feeling!”

After a world-class year, Olsson has every reason to be happy. When we catch up in January 2010, he’s just won his first NorAm giant slalom (GS) race in Canada, putting him in the lead in the overall GS standings for the NorAm Cup 2010. Add that to his successes in 2009 – second place in the X Games big air competition at the beginning of the year, fifth with Team Sweden in the Jon Olsson Super Sessions, third in the Jon Olsson Invitational and a number of respectable giant slalom finishes along the way – and you’d be forgiven for thinking he is one self-satisfied dude. But Olsson is his own biggest critic. “I still think that I suck at skiing,” he laughs. “If I can win a world cup in racing I might think I am an okay skier. But I guess that’s what keeps driving me, I always want to do better.”

Olsson’s desire to start alpine racing again and compete in the 2014 Winter Olympics, after a hiatus focusing on freestyle, sprung from a bet he made with alpine skier Jens Byggmark.

Joking with the fellow Swede, Olsson suggested he start racing again so they could hang out more, and when Byggmark said he wouldn’t be able to hack it, Olsson took the bait. He bet Byggmark almost $7000 that he would make it to the Olympics. “In the beginning it was a bet but then I realised it’s what I want to do, and now I have more fun skiing than ever. It has truly got me back to the mental spot I was in around 2000 when I won a lot of junior championships. I love it!”

Skiing both freestyle and alpine doesn’t seem contradictory to the snow-obsessed twentyseven-year-old who sees himself as “just a skier” despite the legacy of namesake events that seem to be piling up behind him. First there was the Jon Olsson Invitational, a big air competition in Åre, Sweden, and now there is the Jon Olsson Super Sessions, a two-week freestyle event where teams including filmmakers, skiers and photographers shoot and edit a piece of ski reportage. The winner is decided at the JOSS Awards, a red carpet event that Olsson arrived in style at earlier this year, all suited and booted.

“I felt that jumps on events like X Games

were not as good as they should be, so I wanted to create the sickest event in the world. It’s been a great journey and is something I’m very proud of.” He holds the competitions and winning gold at the X Games in 2008 as his greatest achievements so far but Olsson’s dedication to the sport does not end there.

As well as competing and hosting events he has pro-model skis, a signature POC helmet and a goggle company called Yniq under his belt. “I had so many ideas it was natural for me to expand and try new things,” he says. It might seem hard to keep track of Olsson’s various endeavours but there is a consistent thread running through the lot: his enduring love of skiing.

He devotes his entire life to the slopes and thinks of himself as “Mr Never Parties Guy” when he’s on the winter tour close to 300 days a year. It may be a far cry from his life of fast cars with his girlfriend back in Monaco, but 5am breakfasts, 8pm bedtimes and an exclusive diet of fresh, white powder is clearly doing Olsson a whole lot of good.

“My parents have always given me the opportunity to ski as much as I wanted,” he adds.

“They have always given me their full support and told me I can do anything I set my heart to.

I think they opened a lot of mental doors. They taught me not to see limitations.”

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�nvironmentalists in �ondon are sparkin� � revolution with a� ecovillage built by han�.

Words Olly Zanetti Photography Ruth Carruthers

“Pretend you’re waiting for the bus,” Gareth says urgently, as the siren’s wail grows louder. Some twenty people, clutching rucksacks and cameras, shuffle away from a twelve-foot gate towards the nearby bus stop. The source of the siren – not the police as expected, but an ambulance – flies past. The party sighs a collective relief, and steps back to the gate. Pushing it ajar, they scramble under the chain to enter the site. And there it is: a few acres by the Thames in Chiswick, West London, derelict and overgrown for twenty years, ready to be transformed from a wasteland into an ecovillage.

Having dumped their stuff and explored the space, the ecovillagers gather in a circle. They’re a motley crew, totalling about seventy – some full-time activists, others sympathetic to ecovillage ideals but not ready to give up their home comforts just yet. Around the circle, the introductions commence.

“I’m fed up of living in square boxes,” explains Myrtle Merriweather, aka Carolyn, one of the organisers of the swoop. “I want to return to nature.

I want to show what’s possible, even in urban areas.” Others agree. Some are sick of the rat race, or of plodding along in dead-end jobs. There’s talk of inspiration from other ecovillages across the UK, of sustainable living, freeganism, and hair conditioner made from nettles. A sign is stuck to the gate, announcing to the authorities that the site has been occupied, and it’s official: the ecovillage is open.

“What we’ve all come together to do is pr world at the moment. We want to live sustain The village in Chiswick takes its inspiration from other ecovillages that have sprung up over the years around the UK and across the globe. Most famously, campaign group The Land is Ours, fronted by leftwing commentator George Monbiot, set up camp for five months in Wandsworth, London, in the mid1990s. Opposed to the greed of large corporations sitting on plots of land while individuals were homeless or vulnerably housed, they constructed the Pure Genius ecovillage on land owned by the brewers of Guinness.

With several hundred people on site, building homes from materials that would otherwise have been dumped, a strong community developed with the broad support of local residents. It was not to last though, and the end, when it came, was messy.

Refusing to negotiate, Guinness had the activists evicted and razed the site to the ground. As George Monbiot wrote after the event, “Guinness’ scorched earth policy looks like spite. It has no use for the site at present, but it’ll be damned if anyone else can enjoy it.”

Calling for land rights reform, The Land is Ours draw their inspiration from the 1649 English

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revolutionary community-action group, The Diggers.

The Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, opposed the enclosure of land by the rich. On St. George’s Hill in Surrey, they planted vegetables and vowed to work the land for the good of all. In Chiswick, the memory of The Diggers is alive and well in both spirit and, by chance, in a corporate identity. “It’s like it’s come full circle,” explained one activist. “It’s 360 years since The Diggers, and here we are on a piece of land owned by a company called St. George.”

A week later and the village is coming together.

A kitchen, well stocked with food rescued from the bins of local supermarkets, has been constructed in an old shed. The site’s chef, Sam, demonstrates the facilities. A rocket stove fuelled by a curved pipe – which takes in sticks at one end, and lets out flames from the other – heats a pan of vegetables. Behind the stove, a brick and clay structure is taking shape.

Forget tough outdoor living. “That’s going to be a pizza oven,” Sam says nonchalantly. Elsewhere, a central shelter has been built in which a philosophy workshop is underway, upturned bed frames have been converted into raised vegetable beds, and a

lean-to by the gate hut has become a welcome area.

“It’s been a busy week,” says Gareth.

“What we’ve all come together to do is provide a solution to what’s going on in the world at the moment,” he continues. “We want to live sustainably and encourage others to do the same.

We’d like this space to be an example that can be replicated across the country.”

Of course, the Chiswick ecovillagers are not the first on the green building scene. On the Pembrokeshire coast in South Wales, an ecovillage of around twenty-two people had been ticking along for five years without any official knowledge until it was outed by an aerial surveying plane.

Unexpected glints of light were picked up in the plane’s photographs, which later turned out to be reflections from the village’s solar panels.

The timber roundhouses had green roofs and reed beds to filter wastewater, and gathered the little energy they needed from solar panels and wind turbines. Though paragons of sustainable design, the local council demanded they be demolished because they were on national park land. The villagers fought

ovide a solution to what’s going on in the ably and encourage others to do the same.” the case and ten years later, in 2008, were finally granted permission for their homes to remain.

Whether the ecovillagers in Chiswick will be so lucky is another matter. Although the site’s been empty for twenty years, the developers have grand plans for it. A block of flats with underground parking is on their agenda, and the owners don’t seem too interested by the prospect of negotiation.

“We’ve emailed them, sent a letter, and been to visit their offices, but without any response,” says Kat. “I’d like the space to be for the community, though, not a private block that will clog the community up and kill the wildlife that’s living here.”

And support from local people is strong. On a sunny weekend, intrigued locals knock on the gate every ten minutes or so, asking to look around.

“People have been overwhelmingly positive,” says Gareth. “Yesterday, a group of people came to look, and decided they wanted to get involved. They stayed all day, and dug out those beds over there.

And the guy I was just speaking to, Richard, told me, ‘You’re starting a revolution.’”

And they might well be. In the past, community

spaces like this have become the home for radical politics. In 1969, a piece of land left empty by the University of Berkeley, California, was occupied by students and transformed into what became known as the People’s Park. Both a space for political debate and somewhere to hang out away from the watchful eye of the authorities, the People’s Park caused quite a stir. The Californian governor, and soon to be president, Ronald Reagan called in the National Guard to clear the activists. “If it takes a bloodbath,” he said, “let’s get it over with.”

For geographer Paul Routledge, such a response would come as no surprise. In his research – from out-of-the-way Indian villages threatened by massive dam-building projects, to the UK’s anti-roads protests of the early 1990s – Routledge suggests that space is at the heart of all protest movements. Occupying space has obvious strategic advantages. It can provide a place to meet and plan, and in cases like the anti-roads movement, can prevent the opposed development from taking place. Culturally, too, holding space is important. A patch of ground can become a symbolic heart for an activist movement,

a homeland that spurs campaigners on.

This is something activists like the organisers of the Climate Camp movement have long been aware of. Instead of protesting from afar, they aim to bring campaigners to the symbolic doorstep of those responsible for harmful carbon emissions. In 2008, the campers occupied a Kent field next to the focus of their protest, Kingsnorth Power Station.

In spring 2009, the Carbon Exchange, the home of a stock market type industry for the buying and selling of pollution ‘rights’ on Bishopsgate, central London, was targeted.

For now, bloodbaths are not on the horizon and the future for the Chiswick ecovillagers looks bright.

Astonishingly, the local police have so far been completely reasonable, even suggesting the villagers call if they have any trouble from a nearby pub.

For the site’s owners to evict them, they have to seek a court injunction – a process that could take months. In the mean time, the site will be home to organic food growing, radical ideas and discussion, and community activism. For Chiswick’s ordinary residents, suburbia has never been so exciting

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Interspersed with a bit of surfinG

TE X T & PHOTO G RAPH Y J A M I E BR I S I C K

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y interest in Japan is twofold. On the one hand, I’m curious about Japanese surf culture, how a sport that’s fundamentally individualistic and renegade fits into a society built on the group, obedience, playing by the rules. On the other, I’m trying to purge myself of sins committed in Japan some two decades ago.

I grew up in Southern California, came to surfing at age twelve, rose up the amateur ranks, and joined the ASP tour in ’86. This was the era of Carroll, Curren, Occy, Pottz; a time when surfing was trying to shake off its dubious past and step into its professional and mass-marketed future. I did pretty average – my best results were a couple of thirds; I finished most seasons in the mid-40s – and when my career came to an abrupt end in 1991, I fell into a severe depression. I’d spent five years living my dream and suddenly I was put out to pasture, a has-been at age twenty-five.

I drank a lot of beer, sabotaged a perfectly good relationship, and moped around for a few months, until I realised that it was the self-expression part of surfing that I so loved, and if I couldn’t make my living riding waves, I could make my living writing about riding waves. You see, unlike most publications that require its writers to have college degrees, surf magazines demand only firsthand immersion, a willingness to sleep on couches, and a strong constitution.

For the next fifteen years I would travel the world writing for Tracks, Waves, Surfing, Surfer, The Surfer’s Journal, The Surfer’s Path, Adrenalin, etc. And while it’s been a wonderful, saltwaterdrenched ride, I recently hit something of a dead

end. I felt like I’d said all I could about the WCT, the hot young upstart, the A-list surf trip. I found myself viewing surfing from a more pulled-back, anthropological perspective.

Thus, I applied for a Fulbright Scholarship to “better understand Japanese culture through the lens of surfing”. I got it, and so here I am, scribbling away in a tiny nomiya bar in Shibuya whilst the non-English speaking proprietor sings along perfectly to Jerry Lee Lewis.

My first few weeks in Tokyo were filled with the standard observations that whack most gaijins (foreigners) over the head upon arrival: the ubiquitous drink machines, the conveyor belt sushi, the pigeon-toed women, the magazines that read back to front, the taxi doors that open automatically, the surname first, Christian name second, the sing-songy irasshaimase that’s sung when you enter stores, the over-wrapping of even the most basic items that completely contradicts Japan’s advanced recycling program, the slurping of noodles that your mother told you was bad manners but here is standard practice, the way the Japanese will wait for the light to change before crossing the street, despite the fact that it’s 4am and there’s not a car in sight.

That I wasn’t more cognisant of these differences during the eight or nine visits I made to Japan in the late eighties bespeaks the myopic, blinkered nature of pro surfing. I remember miso soup, broiled fish and pickled vegetables for breakfast, and the fact that nudey magazines had the private parts scratched out, but beyond this, I remember only jockish narcissism.

What struck me about a month into my stay, especially after my vivacious wife Gisela arrived, is how absurdly delicious the food is. I imagined myself trimming down, eating light, mild meals consisting of rice, sushi, a cup or two of sake.

Instead, I found myself gorging on okonomiyaki, gyoza, ramen, soba, tempura, sukiyaki, yakitori, sushi, sashimi, tonkatsu, goya champuru... I’d sit down to dinner with no appetite, then suddenly find myself under a kind of gluttonous spell cast by the exotic flavors and the fact that I couldn’t even begin to pronounce what I was eating. I told myself that these indulgences were ‘research’, that the more dishes and drinks I could knock back, the closer I’d get to understanding Japan.

Disaster struck on a sweltering hot Sunday.

Gisela and I are strolling through the Aoyama District where poodle walkers sashay in Louis, Dolce, Issey and black Bentleys with blacked-out windows idle down the steam-cleaned street when suddenly we hear sirens, and then a few seconds later, watch a convoy of police cars race past.

“Something’s happened,” says Gisela with intuitive conviction.

Sure enough, a couple hours later, back at our shoe-box of a Roppongi flat, I’m tooling around on the internet when I come across this on Japan Times.com: “Seven Killed, Ten Injured in Akihabara Stabbing Spree”.

It turns out that while we were sipping coffee and marveling at the beautiful people, a deranged twenty-five-year-old was plowing his rented truck into a crowd of pedestrians. When bystanders jumped in to help, they were met by a knifewielding lunatic, who leapt out of the vehicle and managed to stab twelve people before police could apprehend him.

It was quite ironic considering that I’d spent most of the day marveling at how civilised Tokyo is, how its inhabitants operate with a heightened sense of social and moral responsibility, how they all seem to be intrinsically aware that ‘one bad apple spoils the whole bunch’. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve stopped strangers in the street, mispronounced the name of whatever destination we’re trying to find, and had them literally walk us there, sometimes blocks away. I remember thinking that while America has road rage and schoolyard shootings, Japan has excessive politeness and cordiality.

What’s even more ironic, though, is the video I find on the LA Times’ website seconds after reading about Akihabara: in grainy black-and-white, a man attempts to cross a busy intersection. He’s slammed by a car, goes head over heels, and lands hard on the pavement. The offending vehicle slows, as if to ponder the ramifications, then speeds off. But this isn’t the shocking part. The shocking part is the stream of cars that literally drive around the lifeless body, the pedestrians that curiously addle to the edge of the sidewalk, stand on tiptoes to get a better view, then continue on their merry way. Several minutes and at least a dozen people pass before someone jumps in to help. The clip then cuts to interview footage:the thuggish but

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sweet-faced African-American kid who says something like, “Damn right Id’a helped the guy, that’s what choo do”; the chafed, retirement-aged highway patrolman who concludes his tirade with the scripted, “Sad state of affairs when a man’s bleeding in the middle of the street and no one comes to help out. I mean, how can you just walk past something like that?”

What’s interesting is how the Akihabara Massacre answers this question. I think of my friend Scotty, who came around a corner in deep Mexico, encountered what appeared to be a horrific car accident, pulled over to help, then found himself being robbed at gunpoint by banditos. I think of a renowned environmental organisation who were busted a while back for embezzlement. If ‘the greatest sin is the desecration of a child’s spirit’, as my dear father so loves to quote, then the second greatest sin is the desecration of these simple ‘brother’s keeper’ precepts.

I surfed Chiba, Shonan, Shimoda and Miyazaki, and though the waves were terrible, the people were fantastic. Japanese are astonishingly methodical in the way they go about surfing. They carry portable showers, change mats and coat hangers to dry their suits. They do extensive stretches at the shoreline before paddling out. I watched a guy in Shimoda pull first a pair of knee-high stools from his customised van, and then his spit-shined longboard, which he deftly set on the stools so as not to let it touch the pavement. It struck me as ridiculous, the pageantry trumping the act itself.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but surfing is innately improvisational. The fact that Matt Johnson shows up at Malibu drunk and boardless in the opening scene of Big Wednesday is not an embellishment, but a truism. The fact that Tom Curren did some of his most genius surfing ever in the nineties Search era on borrowed boards speaks volumes. Being unkempt, barefoot, half naked – winging it, in other words – is half the allure.

My friend Naki, a Japanese surf photographer who’s lived between Kamakura, San Clemente and Kauai since ’94, has an interesting take. He says that because of the heavy work schedules and inconsistent surf, there are these long incubatory periods during which videos are watched, magazines are read and imagination is stoked.

“California is where it’s original and cool.

Japanese try to copy and digest. It’s like a father/

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son thing. We watch: how the top pros walk, how they wax, what car they drive.”

He goes on to say that Japanese surfers are a lot more self-conscious than surfers elsewhere.

Because it’s built on the group, because ‘the nail that sticks out gets hammered down’, there’s a kind of sheep mentality. Surf magazines in Japan, for instance, contain pages of ‘How To’s’ – how to bottom turn, how to cut back, how to hit the lip – and according to Naki, these are studied religiously. Not until one’s mastered the basics in this ‘by the book’ manner will they try and put their own spin on it. I find this fascinating because it completely counters my introduction to surfing. At Malibu in the seventies, if you gave any indication of deliberate, methodical effort you’d be laughed out of the water.

And then there’s Japanese porn.

Japan’s an extremely sexy country, though in a way that’s different to, say, France, Italy or Brazil. You see very little affection displayed in public. I recall when I went to meet Gisela at Narita Airport. She was arriving from JFK, i.e., an international flight. Normally that point where arriving passengers meet their loved ones is a logjam of hugs, kisses, chins nuzzling necks. Not at Narita. Husbands would greet their wives with a nod, pat their kid on the head and off they’d go toward the parking lot, efficiently, coldly.

But the same way the preacher’s daughter is the ravenous wildcat under the sheets, so too does this upright society have its shadow side. At the sex store up the street from our flat, I was surprised to see entire shelves devoted solely to coprophilia, golden showers, BDSM. I could tell you about the video we saw – the seven salarymen who take to their blindfolded victim with buzzing vibrators; the caged girl on hands and knees who suffers the pleasure/torture inflicted by a water cannon-like purple dildo machine with flashing neon lights and chainsaw-like sound effects; the gallon jugs of KY jelly and black tarps and boxing ring-like bedrooms – but that would be inappropriate.

I can tell you about the hentai manga that shows nymphets with cum-splattered faces, dogs fucking nurses and, in one particularly disturbing image, a blade-shaped phallus/murder weapon. I read somewhere that the Japanese see this stuff as a kind of safety valve, an antidote to the pressures of the treadmill. While America blames Marilyn

Manson for its schoolyard massacres, Japanese see it in an opposite light. Better blood be spilled on the page than in real life.

I’d heard stories of Japan’s heavy localism, and envisioned showing up to Nagasaki, paddling out to some rural beachbreak, having some angry local get in my face and order me to “Get the fuck out!” and then using this as a segue, localism in surf culture mirroring Japan’s xenophobia throughout the sakoku period. Truth is, I never made it to the beach, let alone surfed.

I did spend a couple hours in the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, which is a disturbing, powerful ride that’s laid out with the same tension/ release, peaks/valleys that makes for great novels.

It starts with backstory –WWII, Hiroshima, the B29 ‘Bockscar’, the offending bomb nicknamed ‘Fatman’, the fact that they had Kokura in their sights but it was covered in smoke, thus Nagasaki was Plan B. Then the bomb is literally and figuratively dropped, which is illustrated by a tattered wall clock stuck at 11:02. You wade through an extensive display of melted bottles, coins, household appliances, a particularly moving schoolgirl’s lunchbox, scorched clothing that forces you to ponder the fate of the victim, a burnt helmet with shards of skull lodged into it, and still more glass, more coins, more photos of the devastation. At the time it felt almost monotonous – do we really need to see another piece of scorched concrete? – but later I realised this was strategic – lull them into numbness then ram the point home.

The survivors’ testimonials are detailed and visceral. You learn exactly what melting flesh looks and smells like. You hear about the piles of dead stacked along the very river you crossed to enter the museum. You come to realise that the severely burnt survivors had nowhere to go – the hospitals were all up in flames. You wince at the rogue illnesses that cropped up in the aftermath.

And then just when you’re positively convinced that nuclear warfare is the most inhumane thing imaginable, you’re tossed into a large, high-ceiling room devoted solely to the history of nuclear war development. In a detailed chronicle that’s presented as a giant wall mural, you see that for every move to put an end to it, there’s a counter move that ensures its survival.

The world becomes one giant chess board – Russia inches forward, America counters, while

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they’re facing off France adds a new pawn to the game... It’s meant to galvanise you into joining the fight against nuclear arms, but it does much more than this: it lessens your faith in humanity.

The kicker is the final photo: a demure faced nine-year-old boy stands amongst the postapocalyptic wasteland, his dead baby brother strapped to his back. In the wall text, the photographer explains that he’s actually at a cremation site, how when the baby brother is taken by one of the stand-in cremators and set aflame, the older brother tries to keep himself from crying by biting down on his lower lip. He bites so hard, the photographer says, that a trickle of blood drips down his chin.

Suffice to say, I walked out of there crying.

Japan’s a unique country in that it existed in a kind of vacuum for two-and-a-quarter centuries. Having observed the way in which the Japanese took up Christianity brought by the Portuguese, and seeing this as a threat to national purity, Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu declared sakoku (meaning ‘closed country’). From roughly 1633 to 1858, foreigners were not allowed in and Japanese were not allowed out. There was, however, a trickle of contact, and this took place in Nagasaki, where

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Dutch traders brought, along with their wares, medicine, literature, physics and astronomy.

I became interested in this as a potential thread to surfing. How did the Japanese respond to this imprisonment? What does this do to a country?

Could a line be drawn from the first Europeans right up to the U.S. Naval officers who brought surfing to Japan in the post-WWII years?

It turns out that much of what I’d suspected is true. At the Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture, I learned about nampaks, those Japanese who became obsessed with all things Dutch. At the Edo-Tokyo Museum I discovered a haikuist called Somo Katu who visited the US in 1860 and came back with flags, playing cards, maps, newspapers, bottles and, in what’s laden with symbolism, the blueprints for a hot air balloon. One could argue that sakoku imprinted a kind of ‘outsider complex’ on the Japanese psyche. Having been shut off to the world for two centuries, there was the sense of being behind the eight ball, needing to catch up. And like the preacher’s hellcat daughter, they embraced the outside world, particularly the West, with a vengeance. As writer Paul Theroux put it, “By losing their Japanese-ness, they become even more Japanese.”

What’s refreshing, what’s a pleasant digression from all the posturing and attitude that pervades the California surf scene, is the general innocence

and enthusiasm of the Japanese. Several times I’d be talking to a waiter or bartender, notice a wetsuit tan or some kind of saltwater tattoo, and ask, “Are you a surfer?” and without fail, their eyes would light up and they’d enthusiastically nod in the affirmative as if they were suddenly ten years old.

On the flipside, though, is localism. From what I’m told, in taking up every facet and nuance of surf culture, the Japanese have added localism to the list. Doesn’t this sound out of character? The irony of embracing this rapturous import then building a kind of moat around it... But of course hypocrisy is part of the surfing spectrum as well: part of the human condition.

So getting back to previous sins.

It’s 1989, I’m a young, loud, and snotty pro surfer and so are the majority of my fellow competitors.

A well-known photographer of the time, Cap’n Fun, arrives at the Marui Pro in Chiba with two suitcases full of seventies polyester he’d picked up at a San Diego thrift store. We’re talking giant collars, skin-tight bell-bottoms, white patent leather platform shoes, glitter ball necklaces, feather boas, vibrant wigs.

Half a dozen of the best surfers in the world, along with yours truly, gather in Cap’n Fun’s hotel

room to sip beers and piece together outfits, the more hideous the better. We then head up to the local 7-Eleven, buy a couple fifths of Jack Daniels, maybe twenty beers, and bags of chips, rice crackers and Pocky Sticks. We hop the Tokyo-bound train with a swagger that recalls Alex, Pete, Georgie and Dim in A Clockwork Orange.

Our first transgression is the ghetto blaster we snatch from a pair of happy-faced schoolgirls, turn up to ear-splitting volume, and use to fuel our cavorting, ridiculous dance moves. Then we steal a fire extinguisher and chase each other up and down the aisles. Then we tear down the posters that hang like Tibetan prayer flags. Then one beer spills, another, another, another, and the next thing you know, the floor’s like an ice skating rink. What twists the knife of guilt that surfaces in my stomach when I ponder this stuff are the faces of our fellow passengers: they just smiled. Our behaviour was so obnoxious they hadn’t even the means (nor the words) to deal with it. I can still see the grey-haired salaryman peering over the top of his newspaper, faking a little laugh whenever we caught his eye, perturbed, repulsed.

By the time we arrived in Tokyo a top thirtyranked pro had puked out the window, a world title contender was nearly blinded by whatever chemical it is that they put in fire extinguisher spray, the entire car had been evacuated by our fed-up fellow

passengers, and a river of dubious fluid and rolling beer cans sloshed to the front of the car at each stop.

Needless to say, the cops were waiting for us. But we were clever. Cap’n Fun had declared a meeting point (“McDonald’s on the corner of Roppongi Dori!”) and we scattered like buckshot. I can still remember tearing through the station, hopping turnstiles, and laughing hysterically at my twisted Aussie mate who flashed BAs at the cops, bystanders, anyone who happened to be looking.

We ended up at a fashionable club called Lexington Queen where we made fools of ourselves on the dance floor, offended American models, and got severely pickled on JD and Cokes. If there was a Robin Hood element, which is how we rationalised it at the time, it was that the staff and clientele at Lexington Queen were pretentious and uptight, and we were lighthearted and self-deprecating and thus liberators, crusaders for freedom.

But that was two decades ago. Having spent the last four months experiencing Japan with new, more mature eyes, I see things quite differently. In its order and regimentation, a new kind of freedom surfaces. Ten-year-old kids can ride the subway alone. Women can walk down dark alleys late at night. Non-Japanese speaking, clueless gaijins can

ride bullet trains across the country, show up to unfamiliar towns, and know there will be a hot meal and bed to sleep in. Japan is like something out of a fairy tale. I mean, where else in the world does this happen?

I’m walking down a dark, narrow alley in the pouring rain when suddenly I feel an umbrella over my head. I look over, and there’s the male-half of the couple I nodded to in the 7-Eleven, with a warm smile on his face.

“To keep you dry,” he says.

“Thanks,” I say, and take the handle.

“Where are you from?” asks his simpatico girlfriend.

“New York.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Studying.”

“Do you have a place to stay? Friends?”

“Yes, I’m staying here with my wife and good friend.”

“Okay, just want to make sure you have friends.”

“Yeah,” adds the boyfriend. “Japanese difficult for foreigners.”

“That’s really nice of you,” I say, and when we bow goodnight, and I try to hand the umbrella back, he insists I keep it.

And that’s Japan for you. You step out of the house at one in the morning for ice cream, and come back with new friends and a free umbrella

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�ith apologies t� Jacques Lacan.

W o r d s V I N C E M E D E I ROS I L L U S T R A T I O N R I C H A RD H O G G

There’s no subject independent of language. That’s from postmodernist icon and psychoanalytic madman Jacques Lacan. According to the Frenchman, people – you, me, the guy in Burberry over there pushing the pram – are all fictitious beings and simply cannot operate outside the closed system of symbolic representation known as language.

What? Sounds like rubbish, right? But… what if it’s not?

Poststructuralists, of which Lacan is one, claim that our only access to others and the world as a whole is through language. It’s the chisel with which we shape and sculpt and slice the world around us. Nothing exists without its decisive and absolutely essential mediation.

But if we can’t access the world directly, what about surfing, the holy sport of kings, ultimate cathartic waterfall, mother of all sensorial overdrives – can we ever access it without the intervention of words and phrases and sentences?

Just for the sake of argument, think of surfing as an invisible island surrounded by words. The only way to see this ephemeral place is to get off the island and plunge into the abyss of words and concepts that comprise the waveriding lingo.

Barrels, drop-ins, aerials and re-entries; boards, leashes, wetsuits and booties. You see, surfing – even surfing! – is subordinate to a symbolic order.

It always – always! – comes second.

But even there, in the soup bowl of words, a barrel is only a barrel because of a bizarre and

profoundly arbitrary convention familiar only to those who belong to the tribe. Same goes for the floater, aerial and the as-yet-mystifyingly-confusing move described as a double-grab frontside air tail whip reverse. In the end, they’re just words, rudimentary approximations of the ‘real’ thing.

Which brings us to this horrifying and ultimately mind-fuck of a conclusion: surfing, baby, is a fiction. If you can’t really, truly, legitimately represent it, it probably doesn’t belong in the realm of the real. After all, how do you represent the surfing experience through photographs appearing on magazine spreads? Can that really be done?

How about this story? Does it capture the essence of the sport? If not, how do you capture it?

The problem is that surfing can only be understood and explained and shared through a symbolic order which sits miles and miles away from the ‘real’ act of riding a wave. Reality – the real waveriding experience – lies beyond language.

There is an invisible and yet insurmountable wall separating the symbolic world and the act of surfing.

At best, it can only be felt – but never, ever shared or represented. Magazines, movies, posters, books, stories, words, spectacular accounts from friends… forgeddaboutit! That ain’t surfing. There is no surfing.

Right. So is there a solution to this freak show?

Yes. Drop this magazine and go surfing. You might not really, really experience it but at least you can stalk it, smell it, view it and maybe, for a second, when deep within the barrel of the beast, touch the raw reality beyond

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