CARDBOARDERS is a blog about artists, engineers, architects, makers and tinkerers with a fetish for cardboard. We also organize crowd-creation-events where we use cardboard as the material. We are based in the heart of Amsterdam. Our projects are filled with a brimming spirit of innocence and fun. We aim to stimulate playfulness, inventiveness and other experimental and creative behaviour.
Lights and shadows, building with the Landsberg Community
We (Mathijs Stegink and Sjors Knol) were invited to Landsberg by Wolfgang Hauck to create a Cardboarders project. We built for a week with the community, refugees, kids, artists and volunteers from all over the world! We tried to create a spiritual building inspired by the baroque Wieskirche and it’s architect D. Zimmerman. The old churches we’re also built with many hands from the community and this was also our goal. The old gym in which we worked used to … Continue reading
Dragon, Dragrace, Dragqueen, Defqon1
What a great atmosphere on Defqon1! We can assure all the critics: the people that come to this festival only come for one thing: partying their behinds off! The things they made in our Defqon1 sweatshop this year are so awesome! It looks like they get more creative every year! Big round of cardboard for the best team ever: Astrid van der Velde, Jeroen Funke, Edo Sutherland, Beau Willems, Vanessa Hidalgo, Anne Wiertz and Mathijs Stegink!
Tagged 2016, audience participation, birds, cardboard characters, cardcore, cocreation, creative, creative behavior, defqon1, draak, dragon, dragonblood, experiment, festival, festival activatie, festivals, flevoland, gabber, hakken en zagen, hardcore, hardstyle, hoeden, hoedjes, id&t, kartoncore, kartonstyle, knutselen, maskers, masks, nederlands, qdance, sweatshop, workshop
Celebrating size: Olivier Grossetête
It’s not getting any larger than the cardboard architecture by Olivier Grossetête! There’s so much to say about this monumental-community-performance-architecture… It’s very wonderful to see the how people lift the structures layer by layer! Check this video at 2:17… The designs are reduced to their essence, so that they can be made with the basic cardboard boxes: like building blocks. I guess this is also important because all participants need to understand the building process to some extent. I collected … Continue reading
Tagged architect, architecture, boxes, building, buildings, cardboard boxes, city, community, construction, creation, giant, large, layers, monumental, Olivier Grossetête, performance, structures
KLIK! Opening: Walking Characters
KLIK! Animation Festival Amsterdam is our favorite festival. This year we we’re asked to do a special parade for the opening of the festival. As if a lot of characters escaped from the animations. We made giant walking and flying characters with students from the HKU academy for the arts and the volunteers from KLIK! We stimulated the students to create the characters so that they had some movement in them: we explained some automata principles and they really got … Continue reading
Wayne White: Toony Cardboard Picasso
We love people with a playful attitude and energy. So we honour Wayne White way too late on this site. He should have been the first post! His work is a fusion of puppetry, cartoons, sculpture and painting. He worked as a designer for film and television (remember Pee-wee’s Playhouse?). His cardboard sculptures are what we need to show here though. He creates them for gallery spaces, parades and festivals. Be true: don’t these giants give you an itch to … Continue reading
Cardboarders for ArtTube@Lowlands
Arttube is a videoplatform curated by almost all of the dutch musea. They asked us if we could fill their venue at the Lowlands-festival with animation workshops. So that’s what we did! We made a Floor of Frames, we brought three zoetropes and build a Wall of Frames. We asked people to work / create / animate with the big prints of famous artworks the musea provided. Floor of Frames: Promovideo:
Wearable architecture
Cardboard is in fact what the dutch call a “kreukelzone”: the protective crushable area in a car. A cardboard box is protection for our stuff, like clothing or architecture is protection for our selves. I am fascinated by people making costumes shaped as buildings, architecture or furniture. Scale models of buildings have a poetic attraction. Maybe it has something to do with growing up: the size of your house when you we’re a kid seems small when you return as … Continue reading
SHADOWPUPPET WORKSHOP
Another workshop at the museumN8 in the Joods Historical Quarter in Amsterdam. During the party, the visitors of the Museumnight helped us in making some paper puppet animations, which we’re recorded directly and shown as visuals behind the DJ. We created some scenes in which people brought there characters to live! We used the same setup on different festivals / parties lately and we love it 🙂
Dining with the Tsars @Hermitage
During the Tijdens MN8we had an animation / cardboard costume workshop in the Hermitage. First you made your own Kokoshnik and beard. Then you sat on the animated table to make a small animated movie with the specially prepared objects we made. Live-size animated sequences and pinned dolls. Walking pigs, melting teacups, fish swiming on the plates… It was a very big success and we are already thinking of new projects with this technique…
Automata at the Jaarbeurs Utrecht!
“Can you make something during our exhibition? Because we have an industrial dairy show, a packaging show and industrial processing show!“ Ok! We can! We will then make mechanical cardboard cows! So during the shows we were on the floor to work on our automata … Thanks too Michael Veerman, Jeroen Funke, Josephine Beijer en Nienke van Soest!
HRFST Festival with HKU Students
HRFTS festival is a new festival by Xsense in the Netherlands. They asked us to work together with the students from Utrecht School of the Arts to make some of the decorations! Thanks to all the students and supercreative Bram Schinkel for all the help!
Tagged art academy, astrid van der velde, festival, herfst, HKU, hrfst, mathijs stegink, netherlands, school, students, the Netherlands, utrecht, xsense
Cardboardia Amersfoort
In the last days of august we finally had a real russian Cardboardia project in the Netherlands! The Spoffin festival invited our russian friends to Amersfoort to make a giant parade. For those who don’t know Cardboardia yet: it’s a larger than life project from Russia. Sergej Korsakov, the uncompromising leader, is the axis around which cardboardia turns. The projects are theater, temporary social experiments, creative economies and visual arts all rolled in to one. We went to one of … Continue reading
MonsterMotel (textile is the new cardboard)
Lowlands gave us the opportunity to do a new experiment in addition to our “regular cardboard activities” We wanted to see if the cardboarders recipe would also work with other materials and we wanted to share our passion for animation, puppetry and audience interaction. So we thought up the MonsterMotel, a quirky cross-over between a giant dollhouse, tamagoshi’s, sesamestreet and big brother. We arrived a week before the festival with a group of 25 creatives and a lot of material … Continue reading
Tagged art, cardboarders, festival, hoer, jeroen funke, kamers, kostuums, lowlands, mathijs stegink, Monstermotel, motel, poppen, puppetry, puppets, sesame street, sesamstraat, tamagoschi, textile, yakuzzi
CARBOARDERS ON FIRE @ LOWLANDS
Wow! Cardboarders on Lowlands 2014… The things we’ve seen! Each year it is getting bigger and better! This year we we’re joined by famous cardboarder and boxwarior Ross Koger (Australia) and a new team from Cardboardia (Russia). Next to our loyal team from the Netherlands of course. Next to the annual boatrace this year we had a cardcar flintstones derby, a sockpuppetkaraoke party and of course at night the monster party! Warning… next year will be totally different! Nice article … Continue reading
Tagged 2014, boxwars, cardboarders, Crew, festival, kartonkunst, LL14, lowlands, mathijs stegink, Monstermotel, nrc
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