NOTE

Theatre Zeebelt presents Zefir7: a design café for The Hague. It was founded in 1998 as a monthly design lecture series. The basic idea was "small and frequent". The organisation wants to offer interesting young designers a platform to present their works and ideas. And established designers or larger studios a platform to present their "B-sides" and "secret tracks". The evenings are held on the second Thursday of each month. Each evening is reviewed by writers independent of the Programming Committee. I was one of the regular writers during the period 2005-2010.

Related

The process is the product

Review commissioned by Zefir7 | Febuary 2008


For those who have lived under a stone in last year, or never visit Youtube, it is possible that the name Roel Wouters does not ring a bell. A Google search may then bring some light. Trained as a graphic designer, Wouters has been making his fame during the last year-and-a-half on the internet with short movies. In the wake of artistic success, commercial success followed, with an agency in London and the licencing of a creative idea. Tonight in Zefir 7, Wouters presents five projects. In spite of his recent success, he is level-headed and is toning it down. He stages his platform time at Zefir as a personal “making of”, while showing the extremes of his portfolio.



He starts with his biggest hit “zZz is playing: grip”: a one-take performance of gymnasts, filmed from above, simulating typical music-video effects on a trampoline. The video was taken real-time before an audience, in the framework of a project in the Municipal Museum in Den Bosch. This video turns out to be representative of his working method. “zZz is playing: grip” has become a hit on Youtube. A London advertising agency bought a licence in order to use the idea for a car commercial. Roel can laugh about it: ”cover” for his film – and getting well-paid for it too.



Robot high school was produced along the same lines, but playing in a surprising manner with perspective. Wouter’s brother and son each express their own fascination with letters in his longest short film “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz”. His brother’s calligraphy is compared with the son’s imitations, with endearing effects. Although it will be a fine document for their offspring, to an outsider it may seem somewhat long. Even so, it has been viewed on Youtube more than 550.000 times.

“In focus” shows Wouter’s graphic work: a publication around artists in the Middle East, which had not appeared before. In it, dialogue is used as a starting point to generate the language form of a text balloon. The system dominates the design.

All projects have one thing in common: the process is the product. The films are performances ingeniously thought out and surprisingly executed.. There is no story line, except that of the production process, which is revealed piecemeal to the viewer. When the page is turned at the denouement, the astonishment is complete. This graphic work is equally shaped by the process. Experimental production is the magical element in both disciplines, the ingenuity often coming about under pressure of a small budget.

Wouters now faces a paradoxical choice: deepen and build on the success formula, or go into another direction, to reach new heights. In both cases the public at internet and at Zefir7 can’t wait for what is to come.

Anne Miltenburg