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David Iselin
People

It sounds somehow ridiculous to say it but David is a man in full. Although he is still young he looks at the world with a mature man’s eyes. He has the best bullshit detector that I know of and because he inspires confidence it is a privilege to have him as a friend. When I met him he impressed me with his being fluent in Japanese. Than he impressed me with his precise and elegant manners. He has the fitness of a military man and the mind of a philosopher; if you are looking for someone to cry with in front of Bellinis “Ecstasy of St. Francis” at the Frick on one day and go to war with on another he is the perfect man.

Seoul Tower Heart Chair

Das Prinzip Seoul

03.03.14
35 min
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Tobias Holzer
People

“So much for being optimistic. They say love is in the air, so I hold my breath until my face turns purple.” raps Lil Wayne in a Drake song called Hell Ya Fu**in Right. It was on a drive from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem when Tobias was repeating this line. It was actually a lovely evening, so nobody had to hold their breath (Tobias was driving, I was switching CDs from Drake to Kanye West and back, and Liliane was giving us directions using Waze, the Israeli navigation app bought by Google for 1 billion dollars). Tobias was DJing (is that the word you use?) in Jerusalem in some small clubs. One was so small that a maximum of three people could squeeze in (you know the Andy Warhol saying: “But I always say, one’s company, two’s a crowd, and three’s a party”). So there we were, three people listening to this genius mix of hip hop and funk and whatever else Tobias played. The day before or the day after, who knows exactly, we went to Ramallah. We had this kind of stupid excitement you get when you do something you imagine to be a little dangerous. It wasn’t dangerous at all. Actually it was rather boring. We drank tea. The tea was so sweet it immediately dug a hole in your tooth. Then Tobias went to do some Chakra Yoga, which I cannot even imagine what it is. That was back on the other side of the fence. I only know that the room has to be hot like hell. And there is the Lady Bar, a place in Basel, where Tobias is somehow involved, where the room is, well, usually hot like hell, and you can hardly breathe. And in his backyard Tobias has a carpet lying around that looks like a magic carpet straight out of a story from One Thousand and One Nights you expect to start flying the very moment you sit down on it. It doesn’t start and you don’t want to believe that it doesn’t. And you wait, and it doesn’t start. Damn you, carpet.

Anissa Kempf
People

There are people who never take their black Burberry coat off at a party. It is hot, incredibly hot, and still, those people are standing around in their coat, holding a drink. Other people, let’s call them the half-naked ones, are mocking them, but they don’t get it. It’s a kind of camouflage to protect you from the place you are and you shouldn’t be. Or you might just be a kid too cool to let your coat go. Anyway, Anissa is one of the coat people. It was on the evening of the 24th December, we were standing around in our dark coats, surrounded by half-naked people, and probably, most definitely, looking stupid. Maybe Anissa wasn’t wearing a Burberry coat, but the colour was definitely black. Standing around on the night of the 24th in the Kaserne Basel is a kind of ritual for many people returning to Basel over Christmas. So there you meet, either full of food or full of strange season’s feelings or just full of the year almost gone. A common friend introduced the coat wearing Anissa to one of the half-naked people and said “she’s one of my few intellectual friends”. The half-naked one didn’t seem too impressed. I know what my friend wanted to say. He wanted to say, Anissa has a PhD in neurobiology, almost studied medicine together with her PhD, could be a professional flute player, and talks seriously about serious matters. And in a way, he got it right, and at the same time he got it completely wrong. What sounds like the straight way to academic fame, which some people confuse with intellectualism, is merely a quest for ones own soul. Anissa is deadly serious and deadly unserious at the same time. She is all classical music and then all hip hop. She makes a journey every Wednesday from Zurich to Lausanne which takes 5 hours back and fourth to play the Arabic “Oud”, a lute. She dances a weird welcome dance with her old friends from school shouting out her name. She is Basel, Zurich, Tunisia, academia. She is camouflage in her black coat, smiling an endless enigmatic smile and all full of doubts. Maybe that makes her intellectual, being full of doubts. Where to belong, what to do. Spending a life in a laboratory or not. Being a musician or not. Playing the flute, playing the oud. Standing around in a black coat in the Christmas heat or not. Finding her way through the half-naked ones.

Simon Ingold
People

There was a time at the beginning of the Millennium in Switzerland when the word “Wachstumsschwäche” was all around. The 1990s were dubbed the lost decade. It seemed that everybody except the little island of wealth in the heart of Europe moved on. An American style think tank with a French name, Avenir Suisse, came into existence. Avenir Suisse was all about the successful future of the “small and open economy” Switzerland. However, there were contradictions (as always in Switzerland). A few big Swiss companies financed it. What made people doubtful about its independency. It delivered “the market is efficient, the state is bad” solutions to every problem. If you worked there people considered you a devil-like neo-liberal fundamentalist with no heart. Simon was one of the young heartless demons, and I was another. Since then the years passed. The Swiss economy has been doing rather well compared to the rest of Europe. Avenir Suisse has lost its devilish image (somehow boringly). Simon moved into finance. We lived happily ever after, met sometimes. In Locarno, at Art Basel, in Weggis. You are missing something? The frictions, the contradictions? Here they come. You do a living but you would rather prefer to do another. Simon is the financial demon with a literate soul, a soft version of Adrien Brody playing a gangster in Happiness Is a Warm Gun who clandestinely writes. Simon’s life imagined would be one of a writer living in Berlin, New York, Moscow, Val Bregalia, somewhere, anywhere. The life lived is one of an investment banker downtown Zurich. Driving a very nice car, wearing a nice watch. How do I know? I don’t. I don’t even know if Simon really wears a watch. Simon has a Fritz Zorn (from the book Mars) kind of anger against finance, against wannabes, against everybody. And at the same time he has this funny way to imitate people out of the blue. It comes all together. Life is one big grey in-between. So it is very possible that I got it all wrong as Simon actually comes from a literati environment and finance is the rebellion. How do I know? I don’t.

Martin Stoecklin
People

There are moments and images that burn themselves into your brain, no matter how important, how good, how bad they are, they just do. They want to be there. They hit whatever combination is needed of your synapses in that moment to stay there. I had this particular moment with Martin. I was riding my bike home, when I was maybe 18, and there was this street that makes a nice S curve in Riehen, and in the upper part of the S I heard a voice calling my name, Martin’s voice. He sat in the back seat of a car riding by, and I had to look twice, because he looked strange, and then I realised that he was missing a tooth or two, and he yelled something, and then he was gone. And the amazing thing was, he seemed to be in a very good mood. It was in our skateboarding times. You looked (and most of us still do) at things differently, at benches, houses, walls, the city. The times when accidents were cool, blood was cool, pain was cool. You hit the concrete, and it hurt, it did, hell yes, but yeah, it hurt. You were alive (and in agony). Meeting Martin always happens in this mood of happy pain. He has this funny way of telling stories, sometimes they don’t even have an ending, but I like them. And I guess I am telling stories the same way when I talk to him. And we kind of dislike the same type of people. He dislikes them more than I do, but how can you tell how much somebody dislikes somebody else? And Martin is the only person I know who lives in the Lochergut, that famous anti-human Corbusier kind of building in Zurich where Pipilotti Rist and Max Frisch used to live. Where you get completely confused because there are floors missing, and you have several entrances next to each other and you are imaging how narrowly people must live there and then you go in and there is a staircase and it opens and it’s amazing, it’s not Zurich, it’s out of time and you don’t know if it’s in the past or in the future. And there is Martin, and there is Ruth. And you talk to them. And it’s good. And sometimes we send each other links of skateboard films for the pain, and the blood, and the coolness. And Martin does the covers of our 60pages which you can buy here (Amazon) or here.

Kenza Aloui
People

What you basically try to do when you write a personal portrait of somebody is you make a kind of retrospection that, too often, turns into an introspection. Where did you meet? Do you know that person? What did you talk about? Did you talk about anything? The facts: I remember having met Kenza in Tel Aviv in November 2012 shortly before young guys in the Gaza strips were launching poorly built rockets heading for Tel Aviv. She is a friend of a friend of a friend. At that time, Kenza was working for Amnesty International Israel. With Kenza there was Angel, the friend of the friend. Angel worked at a set for a French film about a giraffe in Ramallah who got love sick or something. And it gets dizzier later. We went to Florentin, south of Tel Aviv, and Kenza and Angel met a guy who said he would never participate in this propaganda war (Israel was discussing raiding the Gaza strip). And then they all left, Kenza, Angel, the guy, to The Block, a club where there was a Party labelled It’s Britney/Beyoncé Bitch. The Block is near Tel Aviv’s god’s forsaken bus station where you have the Levinsky park where dozens of refugees from Sudan and Eritrea are waiting for a better life. And I guess Kenza is this kind of person who tries to make the world better. Being young, very smart and multi-lingual (speaking more languages than you have kids, for sure), multi-cultural, multi-faced (in Hebrew the word face does only exist in plural, which makes complete sense). Kenza was born in Rabat (I suspect her to be a Moroccan princess), and she did a master in international security and conflict resolution at Sciences Po in Paris, and she might be all French, and she might not be. And she might have escaped from a story of justice and equality and beauty. But the world is a rotten place if you are unlucky. And even if you are one of the lucky few, you still rot sometime. However, Kenza might rescue you.

Julian Schmidli
People

It was a Thursday afternoon. Julian and I started a short conversation on Twitter about the fact that 60picks were to be gone after people have finished their 60 days (Julian was regretting it, I said they are meant for the moment, not for eternity). The next day we sat in the café Grande in Zurich discussing if, how, and when he could start doing his own 60picks which will be gone after 60 days. We live in times of Mark Zuckerberg’s Move fast, break things (no matter if you like Zuckerberg or not, you have to admit, it’s a good quote). Get in contact, ask direct questions, meet immediately, decide what’s next. Don’t look back. Move forward, forward, forward. No bullshit. Do 1000 things at the same time, and do another 1000 at the same time. That’s Julian’s world I guess. I have known him from afar, or let’s say his name was not unfamiliar to me, Switzerland being a small country. I followed him irregularly on his data journalism trips (mainly over Twitter). When me met that day, Julian and I were talking about journalism in general. Do we still need journalists to explain the world when we have access to all those smart people out there? And then we talked about the generational gap with people not being much older than us, the 40somethings. They seem to live in a complete different world of political parties, family concepts, different thinking, Julian said. It was this kind of stimulating ping pong conversation we had, switching subjects with every new sentence (like reading 25 books at the same time). It can be dangerous though if you agree on too many things, but yes, we did agree on basically everything. And then we left. And I knew Julian had to write for 60pages, and Julian knew he had to write for 60pages. Be fast, be impatient. Move fast. Forward, forward, forward.

Mary Staub
People

She drove all the way down with a Greyhound bus from New York City to México, D. F. How long does it take? 100 hours? 100 years? 100 years of solitude. We met in Puebla, Volkswagen city, near the Popocatépetl. We had dinner with guys from Quebec, and couldn’t guess a word they were saying. We continued the journey together South. Always South. Mary was doing the Spanish talking, I was doing the Mexican nodding. We bought papaya, and mango, every single day. And Mary was eating peanuts anywhere we went. Maybe she was doing a Hänsel and Gretel trail to find the way back to New York. We went into the jungle in Palenque where I shot a picture from the same angle my grandfather did, maybe in the 1960s. We continued to the Cataratas de Agua Azul. And there we got robbed. Two guys jumped out of the jungle. They had a rifle and a machete. We got robbed, is actually not accurate. I got robbed (they took my camera with the picture from Palenque and they intended to take my shoes: not the right size). Mary is this kind of person who just doesn’t get robbed. She merely gave them five dollars out of mercy (Mary full of Grace), like a tribute for the fact that we crossed the holy land of their ancestors. Then we ran. South. All South. Yes, we ran very fast. Heart beat of 220. We continued. South. Chiapas. San Cristóbal de las Casas where Mary wanted to stay in the Casa Na Bolom, doing research on lost languages or something else. However, we continued to Oaxaca. We played basketball on 3000 meters. We did handstands on the basketball field on 3000 meters (we once tried to walk down the Freie Strasse in Basel, handstand wise. Guess who succeeded). Then we went to see the Silent Ocean. Mazunte. We separated. Mary stayed, I don’t know for how long. 100 hours? 100 days? While I drove up to Acapulco, imagining a life as a cliff diver. We met 100 years later again under the Brooklyn bridge.

Maira Weidmann
People

When you are over your Nietzsche obsession, leaving Sils-Maria behind, passing by Lake Sils, and reaching the Maloja pass, you will be finally able to see her. Maira. She flows west through the Val Bregaglia into Italy, sourcing Lake Como, and finally reaching the Mediterranean Sea. But she doesn’t stop there. Sometimes she flows to Berlin. Sometimes she has to play something in one of Georg’s and Bobby’s 80*81 productions. Sometimes it was working for DAS MAGAZIN. Her grandmother’s house in Zuoz must be a dream. If it was to start a new religion, it would be her name to name it. For the time being it’s Berlin. It’s Heimat. It’s Jippie Ja Ja Jippie Jippie Jaay.

Soohyun Chang
People

It was in the very last hours of the year 2010. Maybe eight hours to go. Year 2010? Was it a good year? What did you do? We were standing at the offspring of the artificial river Cheonggyecheon in Seoul. It was unbearably cold. Soohyun explained her native city to me. I tried to listen, but I was hardly breathing. Soohyun didn’t seem to care much about the cold. Then we met Sae, we went for some Samgetyang, chicken soup with rice. The old serving ladies laughed at us (laughed on us?), and we laughed back. And then we separated and the year had maybe four hours to go and I got lost in the night, in the cold, in Seoul. Soohyun tells you about her projects and the houses she is going to build and she connects you to all these people in Seoul and you try to absorb everything but fail, as she is bursting with energy and you are freezing. And then you meet her in Zurich, but Zurich was too small for her, so now it’s London. And you remember that the first time was in Basel. You were introduced by a common architect friend, and you realize how amazingly globalised the architect’s world is. Go to Cargo Bar in Basel on a Thursday night and it’s full of Herzog & de Meuron architects from all over the world and you are exotic because, yes, you actually were born in this small city. And Soohyun is all globalised, all Korean, all over the world, all energy.

Das Prinzip Seoul

03.03.14
35 min
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