Furthur Labelz

Well, we weren’t planning on it - sharing another artist with you today- but hey, the weather sucks and we sure needed something to cheer us up. So, we hereby introduce to you a photographer that you may already know: Bowie Verschuuren.  A dear friend, a pretty great bass player and a truly amazing photographer. He is self-taught, which makes his work even more impressive to us. His photographs have a broad stylistic range; some of them are very aesthetically pleasing, others are more documentary and raise questions, and most of them seem to hold whole stories within one frame. All of them are very “Bowie”. Totally in line with our theme for the night (Space) Bowie will push his boundaries, and will give us something else entirely for Nuit Blance, a project called “New Landschapes.”

Oh yes, be excited, be very excited! Read a mini description of the project here, get a feeling for it through the attached photo, and if you can’t get enough of his work - check out his website here.

“New Landscapes”

Every now and then Bowie Verschuuren (1985, Berkel-Enschot) collaborates with the Furthur Labelz collective in projects that combine his photographic images with the written or spoken word, music and performances. Having focused mainly on documentary and portraiture in the past, his work is shifting more and more towards the staged scene, together with an exploration of the non-figurative image. The latter will be exhibited for the first time at the Nuit Blanche/Furthur Labelz group exhibition on June 16^th. In these images Bowie explores the field of landscape photography, but pushing it into the complex inner city structures of the 21^st century, resulting in abstract photographs in a time in which the romantic image of the isolated natural world seems a distant past.

And PS. we’re collaborating with him as we speak. The product of this collaboration will also be shown at Nuit Blanche… but we will tell you more about that later!

The awesome thing about our collective is that a) it’s a collective. b) this makes it very hard to describe what exactly we are/do/make c) this is precisely the point because d) this allows us to invite whomever we find inspiring.

The girls of FOUND are not artists per se, but Matthew and I ran into them at a foodmarket and were totally taken by their cute aesthetics and their philosophy. They find beautiful second hand furniture and sell it at events, why buy new when old is still good and might actually be better? The fact that they are two sisters working together, that they are so excited about their project and the love they feel for the stuff they sell was enough for us to invite them to Nuit Blanche. The industrial space we are curating could use a cute feminine touch to make it also cozy and interesting, and they are just the ones for this job. We are super excited about our first, and hopefully not last, collaboration with this super energetic and attractive duo. Read their bio here, check out their website, come see their stuff the 16th or invite them to your own event!

In FOUND twin sisters Laura Hein and Inge Hein- Anfuso combine their passion for wine, a sustainable lifestyle and all things vintage and pre-loved. We love picking our way through second hand markets and thrift stores looking for beautiful pieces. Not just because old furniture and home accessories are so well made or really special and unique, but also because we believe that there is no need to buy everything new. Buying pre-loved items is a great way of consuming sustainably. We’ve run out of space in our own homes, but stop looking for beautiful used items? Never! So now we find them for you. FOUND styles events and parties, usually combined with mini-wine tastings using organic and biodynamic wines. 

For our collaboration with Furthur Labelz, we use old furniture and accessories to transform part of the project space into an old-timey living room where you can meet others, hang out and comfortably experience all that is going on. Found anything you like? You can buy everything that surrounds you. At B*OOST we will combine the social with the commercial.

We are super enthusiastic about this collaboration with Furthur Labelz and excited to be part of all their different disciplines interpreting the concept of Space. We use space as the canvas and our beloved found items as the tool to transform the environment into a comfy place. Hereby doing what we love most: creating stylish, cozy and sustainable spaces.

www.wearefound.nl

A monday that behaves like a sunday is so surreal it demands special attention and a special artist. So who better to introduce to you than Amos Mulder?! Super talented (we may even say genius) filmmaker, who uses both his own filmfootage and archival footage to create beautiful, strange, surreal and magical worlds on film. Read about him here. For those who don’t read Dutch, we’ve attached a link to a short film of his. Which may even be better, because isn’t a picture worth a thousand words? Exactly.

Enjoy the film!

Amos Mulder / 1982 Hoogeveen / male // currently living in Utrecht /// maker of short films / animations / music videos //// graduated HKU/EMMA ///// WWW.AMOSMULDER.COM 

Als ik nadenk over ruimte in relatie tot mijn werk, denk ik vooral aan de publieke ruimte. In verschillende films heb ik die ruimte gebruikt om aan de hand daarvan klassieke verhalen opnieuw te interpreteren. 

In mijn afstudeerfilm ‘Ghost of Icarus’ gebruikte ik de publieke ruimte van de stad als canvas voor een hedendaagse schets van het verhaal van Icarus. De alledaagse omgeving van de straat, metro, flats en bouwputten in Berlijn transformeert in een dialectische verhouding met de open ruimte van de hemel tot een epische city symphony. 

Mijn meest recente film ‘Ceci n’est pas un rêve’ (Dit is geen droom), gaat aan de hand van de allegorie van de grot in op de relatie tussen mens en de droom in de publieke ruimte. Door verregaande manipulatie en herschikking van die ruimte wordt de stad in deze film zelf een droom. De vraag is hoe lang die artificiële situatie stand kan houden en wat ze doet met de inwoners.

Tijdens Nuit blanche wil ik deze films voor het eerst als tweeluik tonen. Het lijkt me interessant de verschillende kunstdisciplines op deze avond samen te zien. Ik denk dat ze de manier waarop we naar de afzonderlijke werken kijken kan beïnvloeden, waardoor ze meer diepte krijgen.

Good morning! Let’s start this day off with an interview we did for Nuit Blanche! We’re odd, we’re ambitious, we’re a little overwhelmed but super enthousiastic and according to Ian (who did the interview) we’re also pretty cool. Yeeh :) Enjoy!

nb-amsterdam:

Amsterdam and its inhabitants are an unlimited source of talented people. I never thought I would meet so many great people here. Thanks to Nuit Blanche I am able to continuously encounter creative people that live with the strong will to change their generation and how art is perceived today. Furthur Labelz is probably the oddest collective I ever discussed with. Here is why :

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We meet many beautiful people through Furthur Labelz. Some we know first and foremost through their work. We heard of Sarah by word of mouth of other Furthur Labelz collaborators. We checked out her bog and fell in love with her work. We asked if she wanted to be a part of our project for Nuit Blanche, and she was so enthousiastic, that we’re planning on falling in love with her a little bit in real life as well. Read all about her here, and make sure not to miss her june 16th!

Sarah Hermans is a Belgian photographer whose interest in the medium grew from the obsessive need to document while studying English and Fine Arts at Santa Monica College (CA) in 2008. She returned to Belgium where she is currently studying Photography at the Sint-Lukas Brussels University College of Art and Design.

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Photographing has always been more of an urge than a choice, it’s been the act of looking and constantly being on a search. It was never about capturing that what surrounds me, which would result in an infinite amount of snapshots. It has always been more about that what I encounter, where something seems to address me. I used to say my work was often about the translation from something into a photograph, but I think it all starts with my great fascination with the world as it is, as I see it.

 Work that has been made this way could be shown through creating narratives along side my findings, but I prefer to show the photographs as they came to me; fragmented.  I create the work when photographing and selecting, but I want the viewer to become just as much part of the work. I believe that the interpretation of, and association with, photographs starts from within, and that this creates a personal connection with the work. A connection that might fill up the space between the work and you.

My photographs often deal with displacement, structure and stillness of both subject matter and composition. This is one aspect of my work where ‘space’ comes in, the theme of Furthur Labelz for Nuit Blanche. I will work with the introspective quality that my photographs seem to share, thus creating personal spaces.

Not having participated in collaborations before - other than group shows based on the photographic medium only - I’m excited for this project. With a poetic dimension to my work and an interest in finding associations, I believe a collaboration based on one concept shown through different artistic media sounds great!

sarahhermans.com

What a happy monday! Finally the sun is out, so we decided to introduce to you some artists that bring out that summer feeling we’ve been longing for. They’re called Easy Roger Foxtrot, they’re like a band, but they’re not a band. They’re a musical duo (they call themselves a project) consisting out of musician Laurens Radstake and artist Anne-Jan Reijn. Laurens may be familiar to you, he made part of the music for our ongoing project “The Answer is….” and he’s also pretty known in Amsterdam for his band Avant La Lettre. Please visis their website and buy their album, good feelings guaranteed!

Anne-Jan makes some pretty interesting art (visuals, installations and much more) and he also does something mindblowing with a joystick and a computer, creating soundscapes that just suck you right in. Easy Roger Foxtrot mixes this joystick music with more classical intruments. The result is, as they put it, “both loud and quiet. It can be fast or slow, the structures leave room for experiment. It can fill the space or leave it open.”

What can I say? Check them out june 16th. Get your tickets now! Happy monday.

It’s a good thing that we are an interdisciplinary collective, as the people we work with are all multi-talented. Nobody is “just” a writer of photographer it seems. Point in case: Emanuel de Carvalho. He’s one of those super bright, super beautiful, super talented people that just seems to be able to do anything. He writes super short and very interesting stories which he combines with his drawings. During working hours he’s an eye docter, and before he worked as a model, which is not surprising as he is most definitely eye candy! I mentioned multi-talented right? Anyway, enjoy his bio and his picture here, and don’t forget to check out his blog!

Emanuel de Carvalho

Emanuel de Carvalho (b. 1984) is a Portuguese-Canadian short story writer and medical doctor based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He spent his youth in Braga, northern Portugal. Since childhood, he has been heavily influenced by a dual culture, North American and European. He grew up reading a wide range of works by American, European and Japanese writers. He published his first article in the national newspaper Expresso by the age of 13. The article was a satirical view on the hypothetical independence of the province where he grew up, The Minho.

Linguistics, Sociology, Geography became his fields of interest at a very young age. By the age of 18, Emanuel enrolled at the Oporto Faculty of Medicine in Portugal. In 2007 he lived in Milan, Italy, where he completed his medical study whilst working as a model. Furthermore, Emanuel has also lived and worked in Montréal and Toronto, Canada as well as Munich, Germany. In 2009 he moved to Amsterdam, The Netherlands where he currently works as a resident doctor and PhD student in Ophthalmology. Simultaneously he is the author of an online literary blog.

Upper Middle Under Land is a series of written and illustrated short stories that offer a glimpse to a deconstructed life filled with extreme situations and states of mind. Euphoria (Upper), Dysthymia (Middle) and Depression (Under) are the basic elements of each episode. The reader is driven to a broken world that depicts the physical raw translation of the human mind and its potential. Emanuel aims to capture his own psyche at the time of writing. By putting mind on paper, he expects to trigger individual assumptions based on each reader’s personal intellect. He defends that one’s psyche is remodeled constantly by experience; his stories being the reflection of his own by-life-carved-mind. The stories are written in a short amount of time, never edited and illustrated by coarse, almost anti-artistic drawings. The Nuit Blanche performance will be Emanuel’s first collaboration with the interdisciplinary artists’ collective, Furthur Labelz.

uppermiddleunder.blogspot.com

We are proud to present to you our second collaborator for the night. For the first time since 2009 we collaborate with another Cultural Analysist (besides Sterre) in the capacity of a researcher. Those who are familiar with our work know that we like to weave academic theories through our performances, to use them as background and part of our vocabulary. This time we bring some of that theory to the foreground, as we asked Odile Bodde to write on the concept of Space, which is the concept for the night. Read about Odile and her plans for the 16th!

Odile Bodde

After studying Literary Studies and the research master Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, Odile currently works as a PhD student at the University of Leiden. In her project she analyzes how images of the dead and violated body in contemporary cinema on war and terrorism are given and produce meaning. She wants to unravel normative (bio)ethical and aesthetical conceptions surrounding the portrayal of death, the dead body, violence, terror(ism) and identity. She looks at the problematic status of ‘representation’, and finally, she explores how the images influence and construct our subjectivity as a spectator. Her research is part of the interdisciplinary NWO-programme ‘What can the humanities contribute to our practical self-understanding?’ that takes place at Utrecht University, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Leiden University.

Plan for the 16th of june:

In this interdisciplinary and artistic collaboration with Furthur Labelz Odile will write on the concept of space in relation to time as made physical and material in the still and moving image.

Both the space of the still photograph and the moving film image make things that are absent in time, present and visible in space and movement. The space of the still image embalms time - it holds the flow of time and preserves actual features visualized. But this embalming of time in the space of the image preserves also something that is no longer there. Not being able to grasp the time and space of the still image, it slips through our fingers. What we value in film is precisely the movement of the image and it temporal aspect: the flow and passing of time. The space of photography and film in different ways thus confront us with the vertigo of duration and time’s passing. 

We are super proud to present to you our first artist, who will show two pieces of his work on Nuit Blanche at our location. Give it up for Bart Wijsman, poët, writer, filmmaker! We asked him in relation to this last profession. Read all about him here. Scroll down for English!

Bart Wijsman (1987) is dichter, schrijver en filmmaker. Hij studeerde Media & Cultuur en Wijsbegeerte aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam. Momenteel woont hij in België en studeert Audiovisuele Kunsten aan de Hogeschool Sint-Lukas te Brussel.

‘Toen ik vanuit Furthur Labelz gevraagd werd om deel te nemen aan de komende Nuit Blanche met werk rond het thema ‘ruimte’, besefte ik dat ik eigenlijk niet eerder had geprobeerd de betekenis van de ruimtelijke dimensie in mijn werk expliciet te maken. Het bleek een benadering die heel direct tot de thematische kern van veel van mijn werk leidt.

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So june 16th is rapidly approaching (for us) and as is goes; the closer the date gets the more we need to do! We are working our pretty littles asses off in order to get sponsorships, since the world is in an economic crisis and the artfunds suffer; not so the arts though! As you will hopefully see june 16th. We have now gathered most of the artists that will perform and we will start introducing them to you soon. The disciplines that we will be working with are: photography, video/film (installations), dance (dance installations), music and soundscaping, and literature. Stay put for the artists that will join us in their exploration of the concept of Space. It’s going to be awesome.

X Sterre