How did you become interested in graphic design?I guess mainly through my interest in drawing, we were surrounded by magazines and art books. As a child in the late 80s, I also experimented with a big VHS camera editing films. I remember a film I made about a waterfall. My father told me once to try to show the falling water in a way that you can’t see it with your own eyes, which really messed me up.
When I was 16, I went to art school as a guest student—I think twice a week for drawing, property drawing and nude drawing, sometimes four to five hours at a time. The drawing and the lessons, the talking about the works fascinated me at that time.
Art & Design Academy (HBKsaar)Wikipedia
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Central Saint Martins
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Gerrit Rietveld Academie
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Linda van Deursen
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You are from Germany, how and why did you go on to Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam?After my intermediate diploma at the Art & Design Academy in Saarbrücken (HBKsaar), I wanted to continue my studies abroad. It was time to leave the safe terrain. Central Saint Martins in London was very popular at the time. I looked at schools in England and the USA and then, after a tip-off at a random meeting in Düsseldorf where I was doing an internship at the time, the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. The students were very talkative and it gave me the feeling it was an “open house”, quite unlike the universities in the UK, for example. The first conversations with teachers like Linda van Deursen left a lasting impression and were very motivating. So I applied there and was able to transfer soon after, on the condition that I once again forget everything I had previously learned in my studies.
What kind of conversations did you have at that time?At the beginning, I had the strong feeling that you could safely say goodbye to the learned conventions of the German university system. For me, the university in Amsterdam opened up a new world, because suddenly we were all no longer concerned with the applied design world. We were strongly motivated to work on our way of working and our own projects, but also to stand up for our approach—and to work cooperatively, rather than alone or for someone else.
2001