Artist website: Motoi Yamamoto

Refait from Pied La Biche on Vimeo.

Am I so round with you as you with me, that like a football you do spurn me thus? You spurn me hence, and he will spurn me hither if I last in this service you must case me in leather.
William Shakespeare
Comedy of Errors (1592, Act II)


Refait is a meticulous remake of the last faze of a football WorldCup match between France and Germany. Every aspect of the last fifteen minutes of the match was carefully reconstructed: players, positions, gestures, intensity, drama etc. It consists in shifting the traditional game area into the urban environment. Each sequence takes place in one or several locations and then the city temporarily becomes the lab for unsual experiments.


The soundtrack is made up of the original commentaries mixed with interviews of the audience recorded during the shooting.
The sheer pointlessness of it all is hilarious.


(France vs Germany, Seville, Spain, 1982). Shot by Pied La Biche in Villeurbanne (France).

When looking at a Dutch still life I can see a painter who looked so carefully at the little things in life that they became extraordinary who could picture something as small as an insect on a piece of fruit and make it seem startling.
The same odd exaggeration and methodical execution of obsessive detail I find in Viktor & Rolf’s Dolls show at Studio Job in Antwerp. Beautiful and a little creepy hand-crafted porcelain dolls dressed in miniature couture. All fabrics, hairstyles and makeup retrofitted with obsessive precision.

Raised in a tradition in which idiosyncrasies and uniqueness are only valued when kept at arm’s length and a humble attitude is expected.
Their success doesn’t originate by rejecting these conventions, but because they have developed a sincerity in which they test the limits of this sham context, exposing its falsehood.
Therefore, the pair felt they needed to reflect on their entire oeuvre, “Dolls” is the result. A mix of cool irony and surreal beauty, combined with the humility that characterizes their work.

A storage unit that uses the natural gas emitted by apples to preserve potatoes that lie beneath. Common knowledge in the beginning of the 20th century but since we handed over the responsibility of taking care of our food to the technology, the refrigerator, we seem to be forgotten this kind of traditional knowledge.

Ryou Ji Hyun has designed a new food preservation system focusing on traditional food preservation techniques. Her design has both beauty and brains, re-introducing and re-evaluating traditional oral knowledge of food preservation, which is not only closer to nature but also saving on energy costs.

Knowing other ways of food preservation and willing to share this knowledge?
Just send a message to: savefoodfromthefridge

While capsule hotels are not new in Japan, 9 h (nainawasu) adds a new element to the Japanese approach to minimal hotels. The hotel is designed by Fumie Shibata of design studio s, and offers luxury in a minimum living space. It looks absolutely amazing and represents a revolution in the capsule concept.

The name of the hotel is a simple formula. Based on the philosophy of the owners, at its most basic level a hotel should provide: 1 hour to shower, 7 hours for sleep, and one hour for rest. In total, 9 hours.

9 Hours in Kyoto An experience interesting to try out.

Haruka Matsuo likes to play with traditional and habitual concepts. By moving or changing traditional “rules” she likes to arouse a certain feel of imbalance. In this state of imbalance it is possible that new meanings will arise.

Conversations with people about their lives and routines, exploring their habits and habitations, pictures and sketches all these impressions are being materialized into small pieces of work that, more and more, will set the boundaries of the original concept and slowly will develop into a world of their own; an installation originating in and consisting of a whole range of feelings, shared by many people.

For the ‘Provocative teapots’ the rare traditional technique  “Bankoyaki” (thin pressed clay wrapped around a puzzled wooden mold makes the shape of the teapot) is used to combine Japanese teapot ceramics with traditional Dutch embroidery techniques. The images used on the teapots are erotic images that contrast with both Japanese and Dutch conservative traditions.

website: www.haruka.nl

Arriving on Marrakech’s Menara Airport, I was amazed by the aesthetic design of the building – seamlessly fusing contemporary eco-technology with traditional arabic and Islamic design motifs.

This dramatic new airport terminal is an example of how Modernism and traditional Islamic architecture have begun to cross-pollinate. Designed by a team of architects led by Casablanca-based E2A Architecture and completed in 2008, the structure is formed of massive concrete rhombuses. This muscular approach is softened by the exquisite arabesque patterns on the building’s glass skin, which cast complex, ever-changing shadows on the terminal’s floors.
The ceiling has 72 pyramids made of photovoltaic cells which generate electricity from light. The choice to use small solar tiles rather than custom, large-sized panels both allows light to enter the terminal through the skylights (further reducing the need for internal lighting) but they also mimic mosaic tile designs found in much traditional arabic and Islamic architecture and design.

So successful is the aesthetic masking of the contemporary technology through the mosaic pattern, that it easily could be seen as a continuation of the other traditional design motifs of the space.

Last summer I was sitting at the swimming pool to keep an eye on my kids when I spotted these two teenagers. The girl was about 15 years old and she obviously had grown real fast lately. Her arms and legs were long and skinny and she was having trouble to figure out what to do with them. It was clear she was in love but had no idea how to handle this “new” feeling. I was really moved by her appareance and it was fascinating to witness her growing but still shaky self-consciousness.

This fascination with adolescents in search of their identity I also found in the photo’s of Rineke Dijkstra. Especially her magisterial series of Beach Portraits: austere, frontal shots of young people on beaches in the US, The Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Gabon and the Ukraine. She concentrated on the moment that a pose just begins to form, or is just being abandoned. Hesitancy and uncertainty are visible and refer to the existential loneliness of adolescents.

Rineke Dijkstra focuses on people in a transitional stage of their life, such as these adolescents and pre-adolescents on the beach in her ‘Beach’ series or women after giving birth in ‘Mothers’, and new recruits in ‘Israeli Soldiers’. Her subjects stand facing the camera against a minimal background and it’s this simplicity which encourages us to direct all our attention towards the isolated person and leaves us moved and a bit uncomfortable by witnessing their vulnerability.

Website: Rineke Dijkstra

Ten friends having a meal on ten consecutive days in field in the Dutch countryside. Each day the friends, the tables and the food were shifted closer to the horizon. The photographs of the ten meals were assembled into a single image of a large party. Each friend appears ten times in the photograph, each time in a different outfit. The colours are carefully balanced: the outfits in the background are more brightly coloured than those in the foreground so that they attract equal attention and because of the expanse of blue sky there are no blue outfits.

Hundred different tailors in Beijing made their outfits, not because this made the outfits more affordable but to show that the real world is at least ten times larger that that of the friends in the field. Each of us in the West is probably connected with thousands of Chinese, Thai, Filipino, Indonesian and Indian workers through the products with which we fill our lives.

By being multiplied by ten, each person in the photograph has been rendered an anonymous figure. However, the magazine ‘Ten To One’ introduces us personally to the hundred tailors behind the outfits. A hundred shop fronts, workshops, outfits and tailors were photographed. Even the labels sewn into the outfits and the sales receipts are given a place in the magazine.

It made me wonder how many people are there in my closet …

Artists: Zijlmans & Jongenelis
Website: www.tentoone.nl

Close to where I live you can find the exact copy of this photo, a wood of deserted aerial devices in the middle of nowhere. It always triggers my imagination so when I saw this photo it immediately made me curious about the story behind it.

The photo belongs to the series ‘After the Fall’ by Hin Chua. In his statement he says this series is about battlefields: just not the traditional war zones but the ongoing environmental struggle taking place beyond the boundaries of our cities, where the urban zoning system begins to blur and unravel. The transformation of one environment into another, may speak to something deeper within our collective memories: the alteration of places we once knew, an inexorable reminder of the inevitability of change …