such a different birthday

pics taken by d from one of the most specials birthday-celebrations ive been in my life. such a nice adventure.

greetings from schwabing

from my clear white zimmer
mit liebe,

f.

ps. ya tengo un hogar. os espero.

did you know that the amazing electronic producer giorgio moroder came from munich? or that is also known as the "studio stadt" for the amount of music studios around? or that these electronic labels from germany -Disko B, Gigolo Records, Gomma, Compost- are all munich boys that hang out in really nice clubs when they are not travelling all over the globe with their projects? yesterday we had a party, the building around the corner from my house, also in schwabing, three floors of a semiabandoned block, for an exhibition and downstairs, party djs, and really cool atmosphere. it was like being in berlin without being in berlin, with a nicer coolnes touch, not so extremely-trashy-fucked-up-out-of-your-head-vibe that sometimes berlin has and munich doesnt. and i really like this scene where there are not so many gangs, bands or groups, all also mixed up with age. Everybody hanging together, posh people, art students, clubbers, hipsters, writers, artists. it doesnt matter how old you are, how you look or so, i mean if you get to know where parties like these are held it means we are all interested by the same sort of atmosphere, and thats really cool. i think munchen is really amazing. a spot that is retaking the musical actitity started by people like moroder. no kiddin´. i can smell this sort of things, and here something is taking shape that develops into a really special disco sound, which i love.

tormenta de nieve

y ese cielo que se vuelve medio morado oscuro naranja a las 11 de la noche, con la vista totalmente oculta por una capa de luz blanca que cubre el suelo. y el silencio, y lo exótico que para mí resulta este paisaje y esta belleza que se vuelve totalmente virgen sobre los árboles. el blanco sobre el negro. y como te complicas a veces la cabeza para conseguir mediante lo racional hacer algo hermoso y luego, sin embargo, la naturaleza te pega un bofetón de belleza tan grande que no puedes evitar sentirte sobrecogida ante el enorme poder de lo sencillo. la nieve sobre los árboles. tu vida en una especie de san petersburgo, en la ladera de los alpes. hoy empiezo en una nueva galería y d. me pide que muestre el trabajo que para él es poético. todas esas muestras en las que llevo años trabajando sin importarme exponerlo o publicarlo por ser un particular remedio visual contra la pérdida de memoria. mantener la sencillez y lo natural es el objetivo.
listening to chromatics: night drive.
f

empezando de cero

me acuerdo continuamente de male: un ejemplo a seguir.

listening to "melodica craze" by lowfi rockers featuring femme fatale

Improvisation and creativity, capacities that should be developed

Today my nerdy side wanted to share with you bits of an amazing conference by Alfonso Montuori about the concept and process of improvisation and creativity. I find it completely amusing.
just a few bits from the whole text. Enjoy it!

THE COMPLEXITY OF IMPROVISATION AND THE IMPROVISATION OF COMPLEXITY

We social scientists would do well to hold back our eagerness to control that world which we so imperfectly understand. The fact of our imperfect understanding should not be allowed to feed our anxiety and so increase the need to control. Rather, our studies could be inspired by a more ancient, but today less honored motive: a curiosity about the world of which we are part. The rewards of such work are not power but beauty (Bateson, 1972, p. 269).


This article was sparked by my attendance at a conference in Rio De Janeiro. The location was obviously enticing, and even more important, perhaps, was the theme of the Rio conference: Complexity, and in particular the more epistemological and philosophical work on complexity found in the staggering, encyclopedic work of the French "thinker" Edgar Morin. At the heart of this paper is my belief that there is an important and potentially fruitful connection between improvisation and the lived experience of complexity, and that improvisation and creativity are capacities we would do well to develop in increasingly unpredictable, complex, and at times chaotic existence. The writing style of this paper, unusual for some academic publications, incorporating first-person narratives, reflects my belief that in order to understand, and also live the phenomenon of improvisation, and in order to draw from the arts as a metaphor for both organization and for social science, it behooves us to incorporate those very “performative” elements into our own scholarship. In that way, we may speak perhaps of the social arts and sciences, rather than simply the social sciences, heeding Bateson’s (2002, p. 237) warning that “rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity” (Manghi, in press).

Research on creativity has some very relevant things to say about this. It shows that “creative individuals are more at home with complexity and disorder than most people” (Barron, 1958, p.261). In fact, they have what is called a preference for complexity over simplicity--they are intrigued, puzzled, excited by complexity rather than afraid of it. Creative thought is marked by the active search for phenomena that destabilize order, that puzzle cognitive schemata and cannot be immediately understood. Creativity involves constant organizing, dis-organizing, and re-organizing. It involves actively breaking down assumptions, givens, traditions, pushing boundaries and moving out of comfort zones.

At the very heart of the creative process," writes Barron (1990, p. 249) "is this ability to shatter the rule of law and regularity in the mind." Creativity means shaking things up, both inside ourselves and in the world around us, and constant re-organizing of both cognitive schemata and, to a greater or lesser extent, the domain of the creative person's activity. The term “ego-strength,” as used by Barron (1990), refers to the capacity to rally from setback, to learn from experience, to be a constantly dis-organizing and re-organizing system without falling apart completely. Creative thought seeks to make sense of phenomena that appear to be chaotic, and seeks to create a higher-order simplicity--one that incorporates the complex, disorderly phenomena in a broader, more inclusive, more open perspective. Creative individuals, it seems, are ready to abandon old classifications, in an ongoing process of creation and re-creation. Self-organization in creative persons becomes what Morin (1994) calls self-eco-re-organization, suggesting that the nature of the organization changes as well, and that it is an ongoing process of self-renewal that always happens in a context, in an environment, never in isolation and abstraction (Montuori, 1992).

bikes and a home and back to writing

coming and going from the apartment, the need of work in my own things get ready again. after the break, a really long year of working for a really unflexible structure, we go back to the movement and the familiar feeling of finding my own spot in town. we go back to the roots. is always been the same. my new house remainds me a bit to bezhad´s house in kreuzberg -berlin-, with the bikes inside and this open house feeling, laughs, music, people coming and going, the door bell ringing..a bit of the normality ive know for years in my other homes to get back to myself. i finally have a home that suits me.
in schwabing! yeiiii
;)

prague burlesque- visual advance

i havent taken photos with black and white film in such a long time. fortunately i took some b&w film for the burlesque girls show in prague to do this coming up thing/reportage for calle 20. and if i tell you that was on of the most surreal nites of my life surrounded by all the girls, detlef, steve and people that looked as if they had just jumped out of one of the movie screens where they were projecting films from the 50´s you wouldnt probably believe me. but it was like "the purple rose of cairo" from woody allen sort of feeling. and the black and white was just perfect to portrait this legendary-glamorous-beauty that the girls had. these are some picks that wouldnt mind blowing up to a huge size and have them covering one huge white wall. i hope you like them.
still this week we will do the edition and write it, send it and so that we can go on and start with paris. ;)

working

yes people. trying to give a serious shape to all this complete beauty that surrounds me and that comes from photography. all i can say is that all must be finished in a couple of days to see if can finally get deep into a theme that has been a passion for quite long. and when i mean deep is like really into it.
on the other hand, there is:
-another fashion shooting coming soon. we were on the locations and are simple and powerful. really nice.
-the "quiet is the new loud" fashion editorial we did with detlef will also be published i think next month. i will post it complete in the upcoming days because is really special.
-i still have to sit down and do the edition of the pics and give a visual shape to notebooks of the prague adventure for a magazine asap.
-a new project of an exhibition.
-time flies in munchen.
love,
f.
listening to "i feel it all" remix of daniel britt for feist

deborah turbeville

over saint petersburg, a city where she lived for many years.



following you can check some of her work for fashion editorials. she started working as an editor and turned photographer: the grandiouse deborah turbeville.

europa-europa

no wonder milan kundera, rilke or kafka came from prague. i would say that is the most perfect city to become a literature´s classic. such a inspiring place, just from walking around, -tren stations, cafes, beautiful arquitecture untouched by the world war everywhere, snow and this calmed river, the moldau, dividing the city in two. you get stories, words, images to write down in an unstoppeable way. it has this good old europe feeling. the one that shouldnt be forgotten.

spots in münchen: englischer garten

that was a foggy day im munchen town and i love this special fog that starts in the fields of the englischer garten. now we have snow. like a snow-white-fairy-tale-sort-of-movie. when you step with your feet on the snow after the snow is gone, you get all this ice that makes your shoes slide quite a bit. this crunch cruccnhch noise that follow your steps all the way around until you get home and your black high top sneakears are between black and white with all this white powder that is so cool when you go to the mountains. i cant bear the heat. lows down my pressure extremely, there is no way to get rid of it. with the cold is a bit another story. layers and layers of socks and pants and pullies and hut and gloves and you sort of can beat the at least -5 every day. now, about this pic, this is another of my favs spots in munchen, the englischer garten, an amazing park bigger than the central park of ny where everybody come to hang out in summer/spring, beautiful. they keep everything exactly as how it was originaly designed, back in 1789 by Sir Benjamin Thompson, a complete romantic fantasy: plants and trees and flowers and fields and lakes and swans and ducks and bier gartens.

listening to the nouvelles vague version of visage´s fade to grey. it fits perfectly with this overwhelming sensation you get riding the fields with the bike when is full of this fog.

maya-paris-farewell

maya is moving to paris because she got a residency there to keep up working with her art. this are some pics from the very beginning of the farewell that was arranged in madrid for her, which also happened to be the same night as my b-day so we all ended up having a crazy party at the studio from the biografica boys, in malasana. sorry the delay of this pics but is one of the things of working with film.
madrid. paris. munchen. the connection expands but i must say that i love having friends living in paris. is a great city to wake up late on a sunday have a quick shower-coffee, leave the studio by the Palais de la Bourse that some fashion magazine photographer have lent to your friend while he is abroad doing photos and go out to have a nice brunch full of those beautiful jams/cheese they have over there.
mmmm. paris. nice. it brings me really nice memoires.

emmet-amaya

westendstrasse

happy new year 2010

prague prague prague. still digesting all the beauty.
pics coming soon.
east is the new west.
dont forget it.

happy 2010 to everybody. i wish you all a year full of splendid experiences.
from bohemia with love,

f.