Tag: benjamin deberdt

We are glad to be a part of Lucas Beaufort‘s “DEVOTED” documentary about skateboard media all over the globe. Next to Roland you have MJ, Skin Philips, Steve Berra, Patrick O’Dell and many more talking about the past, the now & the future.

 

 

You have to give credit where credit is due and What Youth has been killing it lately! This video portrait is about a PLACE office favorite, namely Benjamin Deberdt and we can tell you they got the vibe just right. This video makes us feel like we are back in the Liveskateboardmedia offices talking to the man himself.

Mr. Deberdt has a long history in skating so it is only right that he gets the shine he deserves. This video doesn’t only portrait the man in his natural habitat but it also introduces a new group of people to Benjamin’s work.

Marc-Alexandre Barbier is a young man from Paris’s suburbs, we met him and his crew out in the French capital, they are a band of young skateboarders who roam the streets. At first glimpse, I thought Marc-a was going to be a kid who only rips at spots with “good” pavement (you know the type) but I was proven wrong almost immediately interesting enough. You can tell by looking at these photos that sometimes he likes it rough, sometimes he likes it smooth but he always makes the trick look nice! I think it was Benjamin Debert who told us that the guys from the suburbs often seem to be the most motivated “They have to ride the train for an hour or more just to get into the city. So, once they get here they want to use their time to skate!”. That definitely goes for Marc-a who in our eyes is one of France’s biggest up and coming skaters and if you saw his part in the De Paris video yesterday you might be thinking the same thing! So we asked a mutual friend of ours to interview Mr. Barbier so you can all get to know him.

Hi, Marc-A so this is your first interview, right?

Yes!

We just filmed your last tricks for your « DE PARIS » video part. Can you tell me more about that ?

Yeah, I was under pressure during the last 3 months I filmed a lot with Guillaume Perimony and yourself (Augustin Giovannoni).

So can you tell me what the « De Paris yearbook » video project is about?

It’s gonna be a 10-minute video and I am going to have a 3-minute section together with Maceo (Moreau) a shared part! I am stoked! It’s my very first “real” part ever. I did some other things before but I am a lot more satisfied with this one! I did a little left over part last month for my local skate shop. As for the De Paris projects Zeb (Thomas Busuttil) and Stéphane Borgne manage that, and this video is in celebration of De Paris’s third edition.

I heard people say that Yann Garin might have a part?

That would be really sick! Yann has been my favorite skateboarder since I was a kid!

So, how exactly did you meet the PLACE guys?

I just saw some lost Germans at République, Franz, you and I went over to them and we ended up deciding to skate with them for a couple of days. A couple of months later I went to Berlin and I met up with them once again.

Have you seen the Roman’s (Gonzalez) cover for PLACE? The one he shot with his phone? How do you feel about the increasing role of the cell phone in the today’s skateboard world?

Yeah, Roman is the best! He has a great style whatever he tries to do, it’s always something cool!
Instagram used to be cool up until they decided to stretch the length of their video format from 15 seconds to 1-minute, for me 15 seconds is the right length for a for a social media video.

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Ollie into the hubba – Photo by Biemer

You were in Berlin to meet the guys from Chill or Die, right?

Yeah, I went there to visit my friend Bapt Chill, he is the owner of Chill or Die. It’s a pretty nice clothing brand, with a sick team (Matt Debauche, Benji Russel, Covo…)

Do you want to go back to Berlin this summer?

Yeah for sure! They invited me to come back to their house. We had such a good week in Berlin. There are a lot of spots, nice people, good places to hang out and good places to eat like Dunkin Donuts…(laughs)

Sounds nice! I want to join the party too, it seems to be the “Dolce Vita” (laughs). Back in the day, you went on a lot of trips you visited Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Germany, England, and Greece. What was your favorite country and what was the best trip?

Well, my father has been living in Switzerland for about 10 years now and I visit him every summer, I use to skate with Sven (Kilchenmann) and Kilian (Zehnder) a lot when I was out there!
As for your second question, all of those trips were really nice but I particularly remember a trip to Italy with the Niaks crew, that was my first “wild trip”. We traveled in a van and every night we were like “oh we don’t know where we are going to sleep tonight” it was an adventure and I really enjoyed that!

You just featured in a project for Nike SB as well right?

Yes, it is a short video for the European contest series, the clip was to introduce Paris and the Parisian spots. It was an introduction for the 2016 Paris AM contest.

Do you deliberately tweak your switch Ollies ?

Yes and No, I feel more comfortable when I tweak my ollie out! (laughs)

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Tail Drop into the bank – Photo by Danny Sommerfeld

What kind of stuff influences you as a person?

When it comes to music I get influenced by the 90’s, when it comes to my clothing it has got to be the 70’s & 80’s and the 90’s-00’s influence me when it comes to the way I ride my board. I like some of the older videos but I also like some of the newer ones that get released on Thrasher.

I notice you like to shop at second-hand shops

(laugh) Yeah, I like to shop there because you can find all sorts of things!

Like colored jackets?

I found an old-fashioned Nike jacket in Berlin and I was like “wait everybody I want to go in this shop… I think”.

You almost have your baccalauréat (the French high school diploma).

Yes, I haven’t worked that hard this year, because I am obviously always thinking about skateboarding and I am under some pressure to get it but I think I’ll manage!

So what do you want to do when you get out of high school?

I want to go to a design school, The first year they let you experiment and we get to try a lot of different courses. It is going to be cool!

So does that mean that you wanna stay in Paris for the next couple of years? How do you feel about Paris at the moment?

Paris is cool the scene is sick, I have my crew with Franz, Martin, Maceo, and you (Nnoni)! But there are always multiple crews out and about so we tend to skate with everybody, it’s really nice !

Alright, I’ve run out of questions! THX doggy!

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Photo by Danny Sommerfeld

 

Intro by Roland Hoogwater

Interview by Augustin Giovannoni
Portrait by Biemer

Benjamin Debert is a mainstay in the contemporary European skate scene. He runs Live Skateboard Media, a website that provides us with our daily doses of quality skate content. Scrolling through the site you catch a glimpse of Benjamin’s taste. Live is a platform for him to show that taste, albeit through his own work or through collaborative efforts.

We ventured out to meet him at his house, and once we entered the Parisian apartment, we started off doing the usual things: drinking coffee and tea, talking about the industry, and of course exchanging obscure skate nerd knowledge. What we did not expect was to walk into a museum of sorts. His living room walls are decorated with gifts – both attached to and positioned against the walls. His shelves are filled with books about photography, art, skateboarding or all three combined. His study is full of old VHS tapes and scanned and unscanned negatives are lying around dispersed throughout the space. What struck me the most was an old photo showing a group of NYC skaters, “that photo was shot on my first trip to New York in 1995.” Benjamin tells us, “Is that Quim Cardona?” I ask “Yeah! Did you know everybody used to call him Mini Gonz?” The truth is that we did not know.

But Benjamin was there for all that. He was there in the heydays of the Brooklyn banks and he was there when skateboarding landed in France. He started Sugar magazine and then he moved to London to work on Kingpin magazine. What I am getting at is that he has been around the block a couple of times and whereas most people get jaded he has not lost his appetite. He knows the up-and-comers and the legends personally, and if you are in Paris working on a project – like we were – he can be a helping hand when it comes to spots, people and stories. Even though he is not as mobile as he used to be, he is still out there in the streets with the same Nikon FM2 – the one that he bought on that first trip to New York back in ’95. Speaking about his FM2, he says he still exclusively shoots on film. We all know film is not getting cheaper but it is arguably still the best way to capture light. Even though Benjamin has said he is just too lazy to go digital, we have a hard time believing that. Benjamin is somebody who is vocal about his opinions and he likes the direction in which the Paris skate scene is moving: Away from the one crew one spot identity of the past and towards an always changing group of people that explores the Paris city streets in their own way.

by Roland Hoogwater
Photo: Danny Sommerfeld

Santiago Sasson is all about three things: ambience, communication and community. He skates for companies that represent those values like Magenta and Futur – both “smaller” companies with a strong identity. After some failed attempts at meeting in a bar, we ventured out to his office, where Santiago and his mother – who is also his boss – work on different types of architectural projects, from creating new office spaces and shops to remodeling homes and storefronts. I wonder if he ever had the balls to skate on something he created for a client. Funny enough I never got to ask that because our discussion seemed to never end. One train of thought followed the next and all of them were worth exploring. We have been waiting for someone like Santiago to elaborate and explain some of the thoughts and questions we as skateboarders have always had.

By Roland Hoogwater
Photos: Danny Sommerfeld

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As skateboarders we move through urban environments that were designed by an architect. You chose to become an architect just like your mother, the difference being that you are also a skater. What happened to you when those two worlds collided?

In my seven years of studying architecture, my vision of skateboarding totally changed. It took me seven years of studying to finish my degree and it was an interesting process for me being both a skater and an architect. A lot of time’s though, I feel like people don’t understand my position. As an architect, I am supposed to build, but at the same time, most people feel like skateboarders are destroying architecture (urban things). In reality, we are not destroying anything we are reacting with our mind and our bodies to the environment that we are in. That is why I feel that skateboarding is an art! In art, everybody can formulate their own answer, translate that into skating and you can see that every skateboarder has their own vision and response (tricks) to those surroundings. Architecture is similar. One architect might feel like using wood, metal or brick. Another architect might feel the best thing to do is to go with more modern styles and materials. When you finish your studies, you are not really an architect yet. You were taught some skills but it’s even more important to learn how to re-learn things. In a sense, you are always researching who you are, what you want to achieve and how you want the end result to look and feel.

Sounds similar to what people learn in art schools. What do you feel are the core values of architecture?

Historically, architecture fills one of the most basic needs of the human species. Cavemen used the basic ideas of architecture to make their cave into a livable space. Skateboarding and architecture are two microcosms, and as a person that does both, I find myself using (appropriating) existing space as a skateboarder. All of those spaces, most of them public, were thought up by an architect. The definition of public space is that the space is available for use by everyone! In that space, we all can do whatever we want. Still, we as skateboarders get kicked out and that is because we are not using that space in a way that fits with the codes and ideas that people have about public spaces. But if we look at the law itself, we have the right to be there and use it in our own way. In the end, it is not about the law, it is about the way that people view what we do. They see us as people who damage things that were built with tax money. What they seem to forget is that we pay taxes and our money also goes towards cleaning and fixing all sorts of things–things like dog piss or broken bus stops. The question that we need to think about is: how do we live in and with the city together? Of course, we can do whatever we want, but we do need to respect the others around us. Place de la République is a good example: it is a new space that people want to use and that is where the problems start. When they sit on a bench they feel like it is theirs, or they walk across the square in a specific line because it is “their” line. When you are skating, it is hard to deal with those things. Skaters discovered the plaza quite early on and they also feel like they have a claim to certain places at République. We all know it can be frustrating if you have been skating a ledge for three hours and some dude suddenly sits down and takes that space from you. The important part is not to confront the person in a stressful way but rather to communicate and explain what you are trying to do. The goal is to create a valuable exchange with that person, a compromise that respects both your rights to be there and to use that space in your own way.

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Is that exchange already happening at Rèpublique?

In a way it is. The new generation that is growing up now is more familiar with skateboarding. They see it on the television on a daily basis. In turn, they have a better understanding. Previous generations might not have had access to a television, let alone the Internet. Your own grandmother might look at a skateboarder and have no clue what she is even seeing, so they only see the result: people falling down, marks on a ledge, loud noise, and scared dogs. I think it is our job to open peoples minds and make them understand not only what we are doing but also why it makes us happy. For a lot of people, the plaza has a symbolic value. That value may vary from functioning as a monument to the revolution or the terrorist attacks, but even though it is a very mixed and busy place in Paris, everyone is in his or her own world! That is the root of the problem. Unfortunately, changing that is a long process and we have not succeeded in finding a good way to communicate that allows us to share public spaces without conflicts. We need to look beyond our differences and find the thing which connects us to one another. An example of finding that thing which connects us is you guys being here. We all have different parents, from different cultures, speaking different languages but because of skateboarding we are now talking to each other. For me, a skateboard is like a passport. You can go everywhere and meet other people. They will show you around their city and you get to see different places, spaces, and the ambiences.

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FS Flip – Photo: Benjamin Deberdt

You were born and are still living in a city that is famous for its ambience. Do you feel like something has changed?

Paris has been changing a lot, thanks to places like République and the new crews full of young people. Formerly, the city was divided into different crews like the Bastille crew, the Bercy crew or the Le Dome crew. Those groups of people would not skate together but thanks to projects like Parisii and a platform like Live Skateboard Media, cruising the city together has become part of the way skaters in Paris skate. The great thing about the Parisii project is that it showed the different vibes that each part of the city has through showing skaters using the city’s architecture. The crew mentality is still there but now there is a greater sense of community. At the same time, the speed of social media channels allows us to see where your friends are skating while you are out skating and at the same time the whole world can watch. A lot of brands from overseas started to notice our city and the ambience it has. Basically, skateboarding in Paris is like skateboarding in a museum.

The space around us has a big influence on the way we feel. Living in a house that is dark is different from a house that lets in a lot of light. How do you see the effects of your surroundings and how do you take them into account?

What you are saying is true. Some people need the sun to be happy! If that person moves from Hawaii to London, that will actually change that person’s mood. We as architects enter into the life of a person or a group. It is our job to translate what the client is telling us and incorporate that into our plans. The problem is that not everybody is able to put words to their feelings. A lot of times they do not want us to enter their “Jardin Prive”. They freak out if they feel like one can look inside and see what they really want, discovering their secrets. The client wants to remain in control: “You are working for me.“ But as an architect, I need to look into a person’s mind to do just that. If I cannot see what you really want, how can I draw up a plan that suits your needs and wishes? People often forget living is about the details, for example: the bedroom door, if somebody is used to opening their door a certain way and I change that without understanding the client’s needs, they open that door and start the day doing something they do not like. This “reading” of the client is subjective and that is why it is important for people to find an architect that suits them. I spend a lot of time thinking: is this what I want to do or is this what the client wants? The answers is both–it is what I want based on what they need. In the end, I am not working for myself. I am working for the client who needs to be satisfied and happy with my work from the beginning to the end of a project, which can last from six months to three years or more. It is important to have a good relationship with your employer. If I have a day off and show the wrong emotions, that could influence the whole process. I have to leave my ego at home so I can do the work I need to do. Sometimes this includes lying to the client so that they feel like it was their idea instead of mine because if the client feels like it is his own idea he is more confident in the decisions that lay ahead. It is like a long tightrope walk to get to the end of a project. You have to document everything and if you do not do this accurately there can be some serious consequences! Architects have landed in jail because of issues that arise after a construction process. The people you are working for can turn into your worst enemies if they are not happy or if they find a flaw. That is why I keep a file with all the emails, bills, notes and more. When it comes down to it and things have to be fought out through lawyers, it is not my word against the clients. After I finished school, I finally saw the reality of what architecture really is and that it takes a lot of time, a lot of time! And that is why I need skateboarding. Skateboarding is the activity into which I put all my energy, whether it be through a trick or the social aspect, it is what I need to level out and relax. When I skate I feel like I have no problems at all.

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The brand new PLACE issue 56 “Paris / Paname” will be available through skateshops, selected retailers and newsstands – some of the shops got the issue already, just ask!

The concept behind our current issue is to explore the booming Parisian skate scene, to visit people, who are a staple in Paris but also the ones who are not as well known but deserve a platform. We met a lot of exciting people while working on this issue, we were out there experiencing Paris with them. As with the last issue the work we do has become personal to us and we believe you can feel the Paris vibe as we felt it when you’ll read this issue.

Here’s a little sneak peak…

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Santiago Sasson “Jardin Privé” – Interview

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Manuel Schenck Portfolio – A Contemporary

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A Cruise Through Paname – Spending Time with Parisians feat. Edouard Depaz, Joseph Bias and more

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Jason Dill ’16 – Interview by Benjamin Deberdt

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FUTUR – From the Shadows

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Alex Pires “City Elements” feat. Ben Kadow, Tyshawn Jones, Joffrey Morel, Max Geronzi, Paul Grund and Sage Elsesser.

Get your copy HERE.

“Increase the sound for more pleasure, i hope you have good speakers.” schreibt Olivier Fanchon in die Beschreibung für Vimeo. Ein sehr schönes Video mit Yoan Taillandier, Greg Cuadrado, Lucien Clarke, Sam Partaix, Vincent Touzery, Leo Valls, Oscar Candon, Remy Taveira, Daniel Ledermann, Juan Esteban Saavedra und vielen mehr, gefilmt in Paris.

Das Skateboard Museum Berlin präsentiert Skateboard Fever.
Was 2003 mit dem Skateboard Museum in Stuttgart begann, wird ab 2014 mit dem neuen Skateboard Museum in Berlin seine Fortsetzung finden. Aus genau diesem Anlass gibt es eine Preview Ausstellung im Stattbad Wedding – mit Exponaten aus aller Welt, die über die letzten 10 Jahre zusammengetragen wurden.

Sonderausstellung des “3eck” Kollektivs
David Lichtenhauer hat eine skatebare Skultur im Schwimmbecken konzipiert, die Fotografen Henrik Biemer und Sergej Vutuc stellen ihre Arbeiten aus.

The Gonz – 15 Years of Adidas: Fotoausstellung
Viele Fotografen haben das Leben von Mark Gonzales aka “The Gonz” in den letzten Jahren dokumentiert. Diese Ausstellung konzentriert sich auf insgesamt sechs Fotografen, die ihn in den letzten 15 Jahren auf dem Weg zur Legende begleitet haben und da wären: Gabe Morford, Joe Brook, Skin Phillips, Brian Gaberman, Benjamin Deberdt und Sem Rubio.

Fakten:

Ausstellung
Donnerstag, 15. August – Samstag, 31. August

Öffnungszeiten
Dienstag – Sonntag
15:00 – 20:00

Eintritt
5 Euro / Ermäßigt 3 Euro

Donnerstag, 15. August
Vernissage – Eintritt frei
BBQ und Skatesession im Pool
16:00 – 22:00

Samstag, 31. August
Finissage – Eintritt frei
BBQ und Skatesession im Pool
16:00 – 22:00

Am vergangenen Donnerstag feierte in der Gebr. Quakatz Gallerie in Kreuzberg die Ausstellung zu Ehren von Mark Gonzales seine Premiere. Zum Anlass der 15-jährigen Partnerschaft mit adidas Skateboarding wurden sechs prominente Fotografen zusammen gebracht, die den “Gonz” über eine Dekade lang begleitet und portraitiert haben. Ab nächster Woche geht die Ausstellung auf Welttournee.

Anthony Claravall, Jan Kliewer, Jeff Landi

Benjamin Deberdt

Chad Muska

Daniel Wagner, Jascha Muller, Lem Villemin

Jess Weinstein, Mark Gonzales

Jim Greco, Benjamin Deberdt, Skin Phllips, Mark Gonzales, Joe Brook

Joe Brook, Marcel Veldman

Mark Gonzales, Jim Greco

Mark Gonzales, Joe Brook

Mark Gonzales, Lem Villemin

Mark Gonzales, Titus

Mark Nickels

Phil Anderson, Lem Villemin, Torsten Frank

Rodrigo TX, Raul Navarro, Benny Fairfax

Pics: Burny