All posts filed under: Amsterdam

Arita Porcelain Today collection

Arita Porcelain Today.

Published by Angelica

In case you were wondering how to dish up the matcha cake you just baked, and you happen to be in Amsterdam, I would recommend visiting Arita Porcelain Today for some inspiration. Japanese porcelain has been on European tables for centuries; this exhibition will plate up some food for thought too. Arita Porcelain Today – in the Asian Pavillon of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until October 9th 2016 – conjugates traditional and contemporary design while celebrating the 400 years old cooperation between the creative industries of The Netherlands and Japan. The design project behind the exhibition originates from the collaboration between the Dutch design duo Scholten & Baijings and Japanese designer Teruhiro Yanagihara. Over the past two years, they coordinated sixteen designers from Europe, America and Japan and ten porcelain companies from the province of Saga, Japan, to create a 300 pieces contemporary porcelain collection using traditional methods. The aim was to revive and celebrate ancient knowhow and traditional craftsmanship from the Southern Japanese town of Arita, where Japanese porcelain industry originated in the 1610s. The flood of low cost ceramic imports in recent years …

Refugees in Mokum (and a bowl of soup).

Published by Angelica

For centuries, Amsterdam has also been referred to as Mokum, from the Yiddish word mokem, meaning refuge, safe haven. The city earned the nickname during times of religious persecutions in Europe, when Jews and other religious refugees would seek asylum here. It wasn’t the best of times for Dutch Catholics, who – in turn – were discriminated and persecuted on this very land, especially during the Protestant Reformation. The Yiddish nickname, together with the celebrated ‘Dutch tolerance’, stuck with the city of Amsterdam, while refugees from all over Europe contributed their skills and resources to shape the Dutch economy, society and even the city landscape to this day.

The Companionship Of The Dough.

Published by Angelica

I have mentioned in a previous post how I picked up sourdough baking last spring. What defines sourdough baking and makes it critically different to any other cooking specialty is that you don’t just embark on its practice, you rather start a partnership with its material object and its very real sticky substance. It’s not an abstract hobby and it comes with all the responsibility of  adopting a living being (mono-cellular as is) that needs to be looked after. You think that buying a yearly subscription to your local gym will feel binding enough to actually have you going to pilates at least a couple of times per week, but knowing that your instructor won’t starve to death if you desert your class will probably entitle you to keep watching tv-series instead. Try ignoring your cat when it’s hungry, on the other hand, and let me know what really gets you off your couch.

Sharing and the city.

Published by Angelica

In the spring of 2005 I was dealing with my first real job in a communication agency. My office was in a business incubator located in a repurposed industrial site out of town; quite a charming setting, although hard to reach by public transport. As I stood waiting for my bus to the city after the working day, I would watch rows of cars leave the premises; nearly all of them left in my same direction and had no passengers. That patent waste of fuel, space, money and time (this latter being on me) kept nagging at me for a few days. As an optimistic 24 years old at the peak of her naivety, I soon worked out what seemed a common-sense solution: I wrote a friendly note introducing myself and my proposal and pinned it to the message-board in the hall of the building, positive that some of the many young and progressive people working there would respond enthusiastically to share car rides and expenses with me.

Zen And The Art Of Fries.

Published by Angelica

I’ve always been fascinated by people who are passionately obsessed with what they do, no matter what it is. For these individuals, the pursuit of excellence is highly addictive, they are quality-junkies with an insane attention for details. Typically, they have little interest in entertainment and live in a symbiosis with their obsession; others often admire them but tend to avoid inviting them to parties. Yesterday I went to Ten Katemarkt, a neighbourhood market in the West of Amsterdam, for my grocery shopping. Some veggies and a cone of fries was all I was after, in this unexpectedly sunny Dutch afternoon, but I ended up making an interesting encounter instead – the path to serendipity is unpredictable by definition.

If on a spring’s night an Iranian plectrum and a bowl of delicious soup.

Published by Angelica

One of my absolute favourite books is Italo Calvino’s “If on a winter’s night a traveller” – first published by the renown Italian publishing house Einaudi in 1979. The novel is a hauntingly entertaining chain of inceptions based on the ultimate need of any reader, or simply of anyone who is listening to a story: the urge to answer the classic question “what happens next?” The very ordinary heroes of Calvino’s book – a man and a woman who meet in a bookshop while trying to find the missing part of a novel they both began to read – are after a story that never comes to a conclusion, but instead keeps drawing the readers to more and more unfinished stories, and eventually to one another.