Social Art & Photo-based Products by Julia Blaukopf

Photography & Art for innovative homes, businesses and people

Select categories on the right hand panel to view images on tiles, translucent fabrics and traditional papers

Amsterdam Creatives | Joke Schole

Joke Schole creates ornate porcelain pieces.

She works on her top floor studio.
Grey light floods the space, which looks onto a canal lined with floating homes.

Amsterdam Creatives | Nolia Shakti

Nolia Shakti works with disposable Nespresso coffee capsules and gold. She sculpts the capsules into expressive necklaces and earrings.

In the center of Amsterdam, rain pangs on a glass roof. Nolia’s black dog rests in the corner beside a transparent bathroom wall.

Nolia moves gracefully.
She’s from Czech Republic and lived in London and India before traveling to Amsterdam to study at the Rietveld Academie.

Amsterdam Creative | Monika Auch

Monika Auch is a fiber artist. She works with a computerized loom creating 3D sculptures and textile prints in silk screen technique.
She lives outside Amsterdam in a village at the Ijsselmeer, a manmade lake separated by dykes from the North Sea.

Monika grew up in Germany, received her MD in Amsterdam and worked as a medical practitioner before moving on to the Arts.
“I love working with my hands and especially fine work like sewing or – suturing.” She is a graduate of the Rietveld Academy.

At the end of WW II the small German country town where Monika’s widowed grandmother, Emilie lived with her 5 young children was shelled by planes.
Their house was hit by a shell and her mother, a young girl, was thrown right through the house and survived with mere scratches.
Then the Americans came and one young soldier from Pennsylvania befriended the kids.

After the Americans had left, parcels with food and clothes from the US arrived at her grandmother’s house.
They were dumbfounded by the gifts and had to figure out that Fritz, the young soldier had sent them.

From then on Christmas cards were sent back and forth and in 1985, forty years later, Fritz and his wife, Lou visited Monika’s family.

Fritz then told his story of the war. He had worked as an communications officer and luckily had never seen any action but was devastated by what he had witnessed.  So he sent parcels to Emilie and the children.

Monika describes Emilie as an exceptional woman.
“She raised me, too since my mother was very young when I was born.”

In 1985, weeks after Fritz and Lou had returned to Pennsylvania, a parcel arrived containing clothes for Monika.
One piece was a lovely red-brown woolen coat from the Pennsylvania mills that Monika loved and “wore, until it was literally in shreds!”

Monika stayed in contact with the couple for many years and cherishes the memory of this kindhearted man.

Monika’s current artistic research project is ‘The biography of my hands.’

She investigates how dexterity shaped her family’s history and her own.

Her sensitivity for materials and dexterity come from her grandmother’s skills in handiwork, cooking and gardening.

In the last century these were essential survival qualities in rural areas.

She works on large scale silk screen prints, based on her father’s architectural photographs. After the war he was employed
as a steel construction worker and carried his small Leica camera everywhere, leaving his daughter a legacy of postwar
documents and an eye for strong lines.

In a fusion of weaving and graphic prints, Monika is crafting an installation of linen threads and a blue grey workman’s overall.

She is wearing a contemporary wearable version of the jacket, made of her architectural prints on Tyvek.

Monika’s mentor at the Rietveld was Helly Oestreicher.

Amsterdam Creatives | Christina Hallstrom at AGA

In a busy café steam buzzes behind the bar. The sun is busy on a September afternoon. A bio bread and vegetable market spreads along the square.
I wake at nine with stinging eyes. The previous day was a hurried mess of catching trains in between two-minute photo-shoots.

After the sky darkens, I walk along lonely canals in the back of Amsterdam’s busy, humming center to a neon-striped café with black walls and thumping music. There, Kristien and I drink white wine and discuss her previous life, driving a tour bus through Yemen, Latin America and Europe.

I sleep restlessly and wake with a heavy head. I guzzle strong coffee and watch a boy in blue type on a small computer.
In the evening a thunderstorm glitters the sky with lightening and hard rain.

A designer wears a pastoral flower suit in white and round spectacles. His tall, lanky body stems from a smooth, bald head.

“Hello, hello, welcome in.” He greets incomers to his solo show at the door. “I have a small gift for you – just for coming!” He pins a tiny, charcoal sculptural piece to my shirt.

“Don’t worry, I’m gay – not trying to do anything fancy here.” He laughs, sending his head in a rocking, jovial sway.

“Welcome, welcome.”

The room is packed with black-clothed bodies.

“It’s like a sauna in here!” Maria exclaims.

I lift a flute of champagne from a tray carried by a balding boy in white. Large charcoal pins display on long black drapes that hang from the ceiling.

“Hallo! Hallo!”

Guests greet one another with three kisses – peck, peck, peck.

Christina Hallstrom creates enigmatic screenprints at Amsterdam Grafisch Ateliers.

Amsterdam Creatives | Annemieke Broenink

Annemieke Broenink creates shawls and jewelry out of plastic.

She works tirelessly in the back room studio of her home. Her husband sits in the dining room, eating “good Dutch cheese.”

The couple offer me white wine as we whirl around the studio, lined with black dots.

Yuen | Eschede Creative

Yuen cooks authentic Chinese food on a thin street that smells like warm bread and fresh stew.

He and his wife Charlotte opened Yuen’s Asian Cuisine after Yuen perfected his Chinese cooking. Charlotte grew up in Enschede. She dated a Spaniard and “gained lots of weight” from his cooking. When she met Yuen, she lost pounds easily.

“He loves cooking. It’s his passion. He waked me up at four in the morning and says, ‘c’mon, let’s try a new dish’.”

Yuen cooks for Sophie and I as we watch.
“What do you like? Beef? Tofu? Fish? Curry?”

He races through the kitchen, throwing oil in a deep iron wok and flipping the colorful concoctions with ease.”

We sit with Yuen and Charlotte when the work is done and eat family style –
Tofu with black bean sauce, steamed filet, beef with curry and organic white wine.

Leipzig | Gold Notes

I drink toxic white wine. Ruby carpets cover the tables. The sky is clear, the wind biting and the bar empty, but for a sole white-haired man in navy blue.

I consume the concoction too quickly and watch pigeons trying to find their way among cyclists speeding down dark cobblestone streets.

Louis Armstrong bellows. Rain falls along the window panes, covered with white doily lace curtains.

            Just a jackknife… on the sidewalk, Sunday morning… someone’s sneaking around the corner… that someone is the jackknife.

THE BATH

A long tram carries us to the sauna.

“The one in Cologne is better,” Heather admits, “but this one is nice. Tim and I spend all day here.”

Heather tours me through me the sauna-club on a Wednesday afternoon. She and her partner, Tim, travel to the spa just outside Leipzig’s city center once a month. Heather has become well acquainted with the huge wellness center, consisting of luke warm jacuzzi’s, large swimming pools, numerous themed sauna’s, a water-bed napping room, cold showers and an uninviting cardboard-wood bar. We leave our bathing suits in wooden cubby cubes and enter the sauna area, armed with just reading material and large towels. Old white men stride along, towels draped over their thick shoulders, penis’ available for show.

Everyone is nude.

“I never get used to seeing so many penis’s.” Heather admits.

Most women are more reserved. They wear towels wrapped closely to the body until entering a sauna or pool.

Heather and I leave our belongings on reclining chairs in a silent room surrounded by windows. Outside, a scene from a Gaugin forest paints the glass. Thin branches of green, leafy trees gnarl around a sterile jungle that fences in the baby blue pools and white lawn chairs.

“This is the eucalyptus sauna.” Heather gives a comprehensive tour. “It smells really good. Here is the bio (organic) sauna. And here is the really hot sauna. I never go in there.”
We walk around whirlpools to the opposite side of the large gymnasium. A large glass oculus opens the sunlit space to the sky.

Outside the sauna arena lies a large swimming pool devoid of participants in the cold air. Lawn chairs spread around a neatly cropped lawn. Two log cabin sauna’s bookend the space. We lie in the far end sauna. Hot stones consist of a centerpiece stove.

I rest in the heat for moments before my mind begins to race.

“I’ll see you.” I head toward the door.

Heather remains peaceful. “OK, see you around.”

I lie in the “Bio” sauna where birds chirp and water trickles down a stream over invisible speakers. Afterwards I am exhausted and opt for a long nap on a water-bed in a glass enclosed room for what feels like hours.

I wrap my pastel purple towel closely around my goosebump body and walk fearlessly to the hot sauna. I think about the Finnish man who died in a sauna competition a year earlier. He sat in a steaming space for more than a few seconds and lost consciousness.

A clock outside the door reads 5pm. It is ten minutes until five. Not knowing the mysterious 5pm occurrence, I enter with a plan – stay five minutes and then run to the luke warm whirlpool. I climb to the top-level of a three-pronged wooden stair space and lie on my towel. Moments later, naked bodies begin to fill the dark room. After minutes, I lift myself to see a fence of nudity. A few women scatter between a large number of old white men. They are closely packed together, waiting. I rise and sit on my towel. People park themselves closely beside. Five more minutes pass. I am hot, sweating, ready to leave. More people pile in.

“Hallo!” a woman greets the room. She strips off her towel and sits beside an old, bald man hunched over draping folds of belly fat.

Five more minutes pass. My breathing is heavy. It feels like it may stop.

“I’m going to die here,” I think. “In this room with all these old white men.” I panic. “I am going to die here. This will be the most absurd way to go.”

A young, hairless man enters and closes the door with a wooden latch. He pours water over stones and creates more steam. He makes comments in German. Everyone laughs and jokes. The young man wets a cloth and whips it around the dense air. The room is a thousand degrees farenheit. My mind sinks  further down into an illogical state. “He’s going to attack us with that wet towel.” I am now forcing breath. The air is so intense, I could climb on it, over the bodies.

“SORRY!” I scream.

Rather than scale the air, I stumble over countless nakedness. Clutching shoulders and bare heads, I make my way to the door.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry” Is all I can utter.

Mumbling ensues.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” a lumpy white man with thick eyebrows mocks.

The air outside feels like life.  Seconds later a hefty Turkish stumbles out the wooden door.

“Too hot!”