me studio

for those of you who were around (and those who weren’t) when we first organised ‘mind the gap’ back in october 1996, you may remember that the first (and by far the best, so far) edition featured the rat-pack of british designers from that period: ‘tomato’, ‘fuel’, my old hero ‘peter saville’, ‘the designers republic’, ‘north’ and ‘me company’, we sold all 800 tickets for the afternoon (@ legendary venue ‘paradiso’) in record time & the event still gets mentioned regularly by those who managed to get a seat in the packed hall…

two years later we returned with an all-american edition featuring (the then relatively unknown) ‘stefan sagmeister’, ‘gary koepke’, the under-rated ‘martin venezsky’, ‘alexei tylevich’ and ‘robert wong’

then in 1999 we turned our attention to the world of film-making and specifically ‘found footage’ with an eclectic line-up of directors and vj’s including ‘wim van der aar’, artist ‘gerald van der kaap’, ‘jay rosenblatt’ and underground US duo ‘stefan avalos’ & ‘lance weiler’

the fourth edition (was it 2001?) attempted to tackle the (often troubled) relationship between designers and architects, with ‘maarten roos’, ‘hani rashid’, ‘marc & nicole maurer’, ‘ole scheeren’ and ‘kas oosterhuis’ and finally in 2005 we invited an old hero of ours ‘pierre bernard’ who had just been awarded the prestigious ‘erasmus prize’, plus his own guests from berlin ‘anschlaege’, another old hero ‘gerard hadders’, young artist ‘jonas stal’ and mister ‘anton beeke’ who kindly acted as moderator for the day

anyway that’s enough nostalgia for now, the good news is that we’re reuniting! after fifteen years, the original team is back together and we have some really exciting plans for a new event, possibly in late 2011 and maybe not just in amsterdam… it’s too early to say anything more yet but if you are interested, we’ve started a twitter feed, so why not follow us and keep posted on the news as it unfolds during the coming months… the most important figures we hoped to invite have already said ‘yes’ and we’re all really looking forward to seeing the plan come together, the previous five events were all completely sold-out in no time… more news soon, maybe…

incidentally the original ‘mind the gap’ team is as follows:
former partners jacques koeweiden and paul postma, art director/designer kim mannes abbott, online creative and writer marcel vosse and finally me, after fifteen years we are all (amazingly) still friends…

oddly there is very little information to be found online (or offline) about ‘mind the gap’ except a terrible website which i am not going to share, we really need to get a decent website made, if anybody would like to offer their help let me know…