Born in 1937 in Croatia, Tzarev has always been inspired by the natural beauty and rich cultural heritage of her home country. ‘My devotion to flowers began in my childhood by tending my grandmother’s garden’ says Tzarev, who has since made detailed studies in horticulture and designed gardens the world over. Inspired by sources as diverse as the indigenous plants of Africa, the exotic tropical flowers of Hawaii, the bustling flower markets of Asia and the imperial gardens of Russia, Tzarev captures blooms from across the globe in evocative large scale paintings which draw the viewer in through their vivid colours. Incorporating her passion for flowers into her art, Tzarev shares her personal perspectives on nature, be it wild or cultivated scenes.

In addition to the aesthetic of the work, each painting holds symbolic significance, outlying Tzarev’s association between flowers and the communities and cultures from which they are found. Tzarev has observed that ‘flowers clothe this world with beauty’ and in her pursuit of various species she has travelled widely observing their meaning in different environments. Through her studies of foreign cultures, Tzarev has found the hibiscus to be a sign of respect in Hawaii and the lotus a symbol of reincarnation in Vietnam.

The influences on Tzarev’s work are diverse and range from the Old Masters to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters who, like Tzarev, have been captivated by the symbolism and fragility of flowers. Her still life depiction of sunflowers in a vase is an ode to Vincent Van Gogh while her riotous blue and purple compositions pay homage to Claude Monet’s Water Lilies. Holding to a disciplined schedule of daily painting, Tzarev’s impasto technique lends her subject matter an immediacy which suggests they are protruding from the canvas. By directly applying paint, using a palette knife, brushes and even her fingers to achieve a slow build-up on the canvas, the image begins to take on a three dimensional, sculptural quality. Her combination of this technique, with a warm palette and familiar subject matter has helped Tzarev achieve a ‘universal language’, which has been recognised on an international level through exhibitions and public commissions.

Esteemed art critic Edward Lucie-Smith describes the meaning behind Tzarev’s work as an evocation of her own connection with nature which she communicates powerfully through her art. “The central characteristics of Tzarev’s art are the generosity of its response to new experiences, its hunger for visual stimulation, its glorious colour, and its accessibility. Her paintings pour out in an almost continuous stream. But they are not, simply, even the flower paintings, a response to what she encounters in the external world. They are also about what she discovers, on each occasion, within herself.”

The exhibition has been made possible through the generous support of the J.P. Morgan Private Bank. Commenting on the sponsorship, Olivier de Givenchy, Head of J.P. Morgan’s Private Bank in the UK, said:  “We are very excited to be supporting Ana Tzarev’s vivid ‘Exposed: A Secret Garden’ exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. J.P. Morgan Private Bank is committed to encouraging engagement with the arts in the UK and we are thrilled to play a part in supporting such a dynamic international artist as her exhibition comes to London.”

design exchange in Conversation with Joseph Grima from de Magazine on Vimeo.

Joseph Grima talks with DE about The Future in the Making, an exhibition about how design is made today. The editor of Domus Magazine discusses the shifting definition of the designer and proposes a design era for the information age: one that is open, transparent and collaborative for a generation that is more accustomed to sharing rather than possessing.

The Future in the Making is an exhibition and laboratory of individuals that offer, each in their own way, a new insight into a near future of design.

Exhibitors include Kram&Weisshaar Markus Kayser, José Ramon Tramoyeres, Droog and Fablab Torino.

Interview: Mariana Pestana

Produced and edited: Joana Filipe

design exchange in Conversation with Markus Keyser from design exchange magazine on Vimeo.

Markus Kayser talks with DE about his work, which shifts away from the fight between technology and nature, trying to overcome it. Interested in production rather than style, he investigates possibilities for the future through experimental design. Winner of W Hotels Designers of The Future Award, Markus explains how his work inspires industry by showing that it’s possible to make things differently. His project Solar Sinter, a numerical control machine designed to construct objects only with solar power and using sand as a raw material, is on display at The Future in The Making exhibition.

Interview: Mariana Pestana

Produced and edited: Joana Filipe

design exchange in Conversation with Beatrice Galilee from design exchange magazine on Vimeo.

Beatrice Galilee talks with DE about Hacked, a programme of events, performances and workshops for Milan Design Week. In the context of a design supermarket, La Rinascente, Hacked works as a counterpoint to the object oriented design. Through highly performative pieces, Hacked discusses complex ideas with a general audience and offers a challenging idea of what design could be.

Amongst the practices that made Hacked, 100 Hours of Rebellious Imagination, are Honey and Bunny, Technology Will Save Us, Wikihouse, Nelly Ben-Hayoun and Something and Son and Dominic Wilcox.

More info at:

www.hackedmilan.it

Interview: Mariana Pestana

Produced and edited: Joana Filipe

A research trip to Luanda needs to be thoroughly and patiently planned. You will need a visa, but unless you are working for a company which takes care of the process on your behalf, it will be very hard to get it; not least as a citizen of Angola’s former coloniser, Portugal.

To get a visa, an Angolan citizen or expatriate with a residents’ permit must formally invite you. The letter must be very carefully written, because misusing a word or misplacing a sentence might mean you have to begin the application process again. The letter and identity documents of the signatory must be authenticated by a local notary and by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then faxed to the consulate, before being emailed to you. Take into consideration that on the day your friend goes to see the notary, the electricity might have gone off and nobody knows when work can begin again.

“Be patient, it’s Africa,” you will hear.

You will need to show a clear criminal record, and an international certificate proving you have been vaccinated against yellow fever, polio and hepatitis. You will also need to present a bank statement proving you have withdrawn $6,000 (officially, you are expected to spend $200 per day during your stay in Angola). Once you have fulfilled all these requirements, you will still need to pay for the flights and visa services, which adds up to another £1500 or so. Then, sit back and wait for four or five weeks.

If your Angolan friend cannot put you up, you will need to find somewhere to stay. Hotels are out of the question (Luanda topped the cost-of life ranking in 2010). Fortunately for me, by the time I had started planning my journey, a friend of a friend had returned from Angola, and recommended staying with a local family. He showed me photos of a courtyard with a vibrant sense of inhabitation: kids playing; hens wandering; a tyre rim used as a barbecue; a man shaving holding a piece of mirror. At the back, the room which was to be my home for the month I was to spend in Luanda.

Apocryphally, everyone in Portugal knows someone ‘earning loads of money in Angola’. In practice, the expatriates speak in warning tones: “There’s no-one to pick you up at the airport? You must be crazy! No driver? You’ll never survive here.” Even though, as soon as I’d collected my visa, I bought loads of mosquito repellent, expensive anti-malaria pills and jumped onto the plane.

Once I arrived, Luis was a couple of hours late. There I was, in the recently renovated airport, waiting for someone I did not know. I watched the courteous greetings between American oil-men and their company drivers, as a plane landed from Houston. A TV screen showed São Paulo, Shanghai and Lisbon on the arrivals list. Finally Luis arrived. Once I had met my “chauffeur”, it took us over an hour to drive home; through a never-ending, chaotic traffic jam.

“Be patient, it’s Africa”, I thought.

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Research topics, 2011. Chicala is surrounded by a colonial and a post-colonial monuments (Fortress and Mausoleum). The three nuclei are connected by boat, from the continent to the island. There is a reciprocity between the public dimension of the settlement and the collective character of the domestic space.

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House plan/ family tree, 2011. Relationship between social and spatial topographies: the house has been progressively extended and upgraded, as the family continuously grows. The process has a parallel in the development of the settlement as a whole.

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Thinking Room, 2010. Following conversations with members of the host family, a room extension was proposed, to be built on top of the guest room, in the back of the courtyard, supported by large-scale replicas of a National symbol, O Pensador.

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Building Angola, 2010. Materials and objects were collected from private courtyards in Chicala and construction sites within the city. The work was produced with the participation of local residents and remains on display at Galeria Celamar, in the island of Luanda.

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Members of the host family were invited to photograph ordinary life in Chicala. The results express the cycles of day/life of a typical family. Doing laundry in the courtyard, photo by Tiusa Damião, 19.

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On the way to a friend’s house, photo by Selani Damião, 11.

Image taken more recently after the feature was published in issue 23

video by: xister / Radio / Lumin

“Trade discount is for trade, not retail, and mixing the two is unfair to all parties. The SBID Fair Trading Policy does not recommend, support or promote passing on trade discounts to the public.”

Historically some interior decorators and designers passed on their trade price to potential clients to obtain work. That is desperation, not a design commission. Such designers and decorators cause mass damage to the overall industry: they undermine the retailers’ position and they betray the supplier’s price structuring integrity. In doing so, they create grey billing procedures where the customer is unable to breakdown an invoice costs and assumes inflated pricing, leading to disputes. In addition, a lack of transparency on fees, discounts and project fee structuring has often prevented potential clients from seeking professional design advice at all.

The common practice of designers passing trade discounts to their customers, i.e. the public, shrinks the development of interior design as a profession and ultimately costs each market sector profit and reputation. It is not surprising that those who trade in this practice are the largest sector in administration and bankruptcy. They are also the most boisterous when policies such as the SBID Fair Trading Policy are introduced. SBID’s aim in implementing the Fair Trading Policy is specifically to further separate hobbyists from professionals and, in doing so, raise the standards of the entire profession.

Practitioners who provide a design service free of charge undermine the overall design industry. It is neither appropriate nor financially sustainable for professionals to provide their key performance, their design knowledge and advice, free of charge. It is by charging a fee for the trained services of a professional designer, that a designer generates income.

Retail prices include the cost of stock and customer service. Trade prices are products supplied on business-to-business (B2B) terms by manufacturers, or professional industry partners (PIPs). Interior design has until now rarely respected the difference. Currently, two common unprofessional billing methods adopted by designers are:

• Sharing trade prices as leverage to obtain projects;
• Providing a free design service, creating income from ‘supplying goods’ only.

All too often, a designer’s unrealistic recognition of project costs and random product supply between trade and retail pricing generates customer complaints. This common practice is therefore a threat to the overall reputation and growth of the profession of design.

Other grey areas of passing on trade prices to one-time-purchasers make it impossible for retailers to compete fairly. Supplying goods has additional costs attached for different performances: retailers absorb costs such as showroom space, staffing, after-sales service and product training etc. which designers do not provide.

There is a clear additional cost in every sale a retailer makes when compared to the service provided by a designer. Designers may need to install, take delivery, organise returns of products, and so on, and this clearly has time (and cost) attached. Therefore, the fee a designer earns in a trade price reflects some of the services the designer performs.

Under the SBID Fair Trading Policy, a clear charging system sets out procedures for other services such as sourcing and supplying products. SBID design professionals are encouraged to be transparent about rates for hourly, daily and project billing fees in their terms of engagement.

The policy supports SBID Designers and PIPs* and provides a fair, equitable industry plan for growth. Registered SBID international industry body members are supported by the policy to promote qualified services, however the policy does not advise, direct or propose what a fee rate should be.”

*PIPs – Professional Industry Partner

There are around 15 of us that meet regularly but the wider group of people involved in Assemble is much more than that – it’s quite an organic group and I couldn’t give you a figure! Because of the fact that most of us are working or still in education, the amount of time people are able to commit to Assemble is always changing. Having enough people in the first place I think allows this flexible model – there will always be enough people to meet to discuss the current project but we try our best to keep the wider group abreast of what is happening through constant bombardment with mass email threads.

You’re an interdisciplinary group…how did it all start?

The main body of the group came together at the beginning of 2010 with the intention of working on a collaborative project and that turned into the Cineroleum. Most of those initial members of Assemble met studying architecture at Cambridge, but through the Cineroleum project it picked up a number of new members – friends of friends, people who helped us out delivering the broader scope of the cinema (i.e. not just the constructional side of things). It is an essential feature of the two Assemble projects so far that the building is a part of the story, but by no means all of it. Having members coming from backgrounds in art, film, performance and promotion among others is both a cause and a result of this. Each time we do a project the group, its scope and ambition grows a little more.

So when was it that you decided to turn a project into a practice?

Another difficult question! I don’t know if we would describe Assemble as a practice, not yet at least, and certainly not in the traditional sense of course. On the technical side of things we became ‘Assemble CIC’ earlier this year, that was necessary just because the scale and budget of the Folly was on another level to that of the Cineroleum. Once you start dealing with larger organisations, larger sums of money and ultimately more risk, inevitably your working practice needs to become gradually more formal. That strictness has so far remained on paper fortunately, we still managed to operate in a fairly informal manner throughout the Folly.

Not having a fixed HQ (i.e. working out of bedrooms and the back rooms of pubs) again contributes to the amorphous nature of Assemble’s practice – most of us have to operate in our spare time to make Assemble happen. We are currently working on a more permanent home for the group at Sugar House Lane (near the Three Mills in Bow) with a workshop, a space to rehouse a mini-Cineroleum and a public cafe. Obtaining an ‘office’ like this one could describe as another move towards formalising Assemble as a practice – albeit an office with an unusually public aspect. Just like the Cineroleum and the Folly, a large part of the development of this project will take place as we go along, on site.

I’m interested in the very practical side of your relationship as a group: do you all work on every project?

The Folly project started as a large group. When we had a good idea of what we were doing and had secured funding after a few months, we began to take on more specific responsibilities simply because the logistics of delivering the project required it. Although we had specialised roles, we all managed to keep an overview of the project and discuss the really important issues as a group, and for this reason we all maintained a sense of ownership and involvement – it would not have been an Assemble project if we hadn’t.

Its definitely a very democratic approach, quite idealistic! But how efficient is that model, can you sustain it for much longer?

This is a particularly live issue for us at the moment. We now seem to be entering into a new kind of phase in the working model for Assemble because for the first time a lot of different people are beginning to approach us with new projects. Because these are not totally self-initiated and because some of these clients have their own ideas about what they want, we are starting to split into smaller groups, each person getting involved in the project that interests them. It is also a question of efficiency in that in some cases it is in fact easier to operate with less people. The important thing for us is to hold on to the group as a whole, for everyone to be have a decent idea of what is happening with each project, and for everyone to be able to comment and contribute where they want.

How do you see Assemble’s model of collaboration reflected in your projects? Would you say it opens opportunities that a more orthodox form of practicing would not?

The broadness of the ambition of the projects reflects the collaboration within the main body of Assemble between a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and interests. Equally as important as this is the way we have worked with other organizations, over the Cineroleum and especially the Folly. Working with specialists and other groups similar to ourselves has given the projects a richness which we could not have achieved by ourselves. In particular I am thinking about Studio Dekka, who developed the lighting schemes for both the Cineroleum and the Folly. Dekka understand our dynamic very well and have really brought a lot to those two projects.

Apart from the main cinematic programme there were a great number of different groups that ran workshops and hosted events at the Folly. The whole of the water-based side to the Folly project would not have been possible without Floating House Productions. Situated just across the canal, Marek (director) became an integral part of the operation – providing advice and expertise, running boat trips, and bringing about another collaboration with Voluntary Design and Build to build The End of the Pier – the pontoon that allowed us to run a boat service to and from the Folly and became a side-project in its own right.

Celebrating its 51st year, Alongside the other events – Salone Internazionale del Mobile, the International Furnishing Accessories Exhibition, Euroluce / International Lighting Exhibition, SaloneUfficio / International Biennial Workspace Exhibition and SaloneSatellite – the city literally becoming a fairground for creativity and design. With over 2,500 exhibitors in the Furniture Fair along and visitors from across the globe, walking shoes are a must. The amount of events and exhibitions on offer are so dizzying, it will take some serious organization to find all your must-sees but it’s a challenge you should definitely be up for.

For more information www.collatepresents.com