Skateboarding: Urban Art & Culture Explored

Ten skateboarders and a lot of powder - The idea for this short film is really extraordinary! Imaging, your skateboard and yourself are totally dusted with powder and you’re riding your board through a nice skate-park. The impressions for people around you must be great. The powder creates an unusual dust behind you after every move or jump and it seems that you disband yourself. The ten minutes film “Wizard Smoke” presents this very interesting impressions. The Salazar Productions crew filmed pro-skateboarders, like Bradley Sheppard, Alien, Nate Lacoste, Chris Connolly, Nate Roline and others and recorded for this reason the colorful clouds in their wake. ...

An abandoned pool, some well-talented skaters and a lot of time to skate and have fun - what should there be more? Right, an internationally known urban artist who creates a fabulous skull-hell out of the pool! British street artist D*Face recently visited together with Gary Owens, Salba, and other pro-skaters the “Ridiculous Pool” in pro surfer Peter King’s backyard in LA and redesigned it with about 500 to 1,000 skull stencils. ...

I regularly ask myself, how to renew and use abandoned places, like old industrial areas, dead railway lines or uninhabited houses in the cities around the world. A flagship project is the underground skatepark in London. Do you know? It’s called “White Grounds Skate Plaza” and open since April 2007. It’s located in an old, formerly disused service tunnel close to London Bridge station and was designed by the “Side Effects Of Urethane” crew. ...

I like skate-parks. I like it to make some nice shots of boys and girls skating, flying and falling down. I like the atmosphere of those places, where young urban people spent their spare time. And I love it, when there’s some colorful interior! In Swiss Lugano, a urban art collective, named Nevercrew, painted a whole skate pool some time ago. Now it’s really a pool - a fantastic octopus pool! The Nevercrew is specialize in creating murals, graphics, videos, comics and sculptures. ...

Last week, I got the new issue of the “Hidden Champion”. It’s a free Japanese urban magazine, featuring hidden champions of many cultures. This time, well-known graffiti artist Craig “KR” Costello respectively one of his fire extinguishers is on the front page! In addition to great pictures of his artworks, there’s an interview with him. By the way, do you Remember that KR is in Hamburg next week! This issue also contains portfolios of the skateboarders Quim Cardona, Yoshiaki Toeda, Joey Pepper, Henry Panza, Ricky Oyola and Rob Welsh, an interview with BMX-pro Masato Nishino, and articles about some other interesting people. ...

There’s a good reason for not writing something last weekend - the phenomenal extreme sports event Freestyle Berlin! Freestyle Berlin, that was impressing freestyle motocross (FMX), great freestyle skateboarding in a four meter vertramp, freeskiing and freestyle snowboarding on three days at the former airport Tempelhof in Berlin. My friends, I and about 13,000 other visitors were fascinated by the extreme stunts, jumps and drops. I took a lot of photos there and made a nice black-and-white series out of them - take a look into my Flickr-photostream! ...

Next week, a phenomenal extreme sports event will taking place in Berlin - Freestyle.Berlin! If you are interested in urban sports or other freestyle activities, you should read the next lines from the press release very carefully: Freestyle Berlin 2009 “On a full weekend, the 60 world’s best athletes in the disciplines of snowboarding, freeskiing, FMX and skateboarding compete for cash prizes totaling more than US$ 110,000 and the titles “freestyle.champ” and “crossover.champ”. ...

Do you know the skateboarding documentation “Freedom Of Space”? I read about it some days ago and thought, it’s a bit dated, but who cares?! When most people think of the word environment, say think of rivers, mountains and lakes - the natural environment. But for most of us, our environment is quite different. (The introduction) Freedom Of Space is a very interesting film, by Steve Olpin and Tim Irvin, about skateboard culture in public space. It has a look at the street skaters and their social and political conflict with the urban environment and publicity. ...

Ed Templeton is not only pro skateboarder, contemporary artist, painter, writer and photographer - no - he is one of the “Beautiful Losers”! In addition to that, he has his own skateboard company, named “Toy Machine” and belongs to the hip creative head of our time. Also in Berlin artworks of him were shown a few week ago, when he exhibited along with Pettibon and McGee at the Circle Culture Gallery. ...

There are a lot of skateboarding competitions out there, but this one I like really much, ’cause it combines the urban sport with design and creative ideas! “The Legend Of Boxton Square” by skateboard crew Etnies is the winner of this years “Skate & Create” skateboarding contest by Transworld. The video is really nice although I haven’t seen all contest clips yet. If you’re interested in getting to know the people a little bit closer, take a look at the interview with two of the crew member, Kyle Leeper and Mike Taylor!