CARDBOARDERS is a blog about artists, engineers, architects and people with a fetish for cardboard. Cardboarders organizes crowd events that use cardboard as a material. These projects are filled with a brimming spirit of innocence and fun. They try to stimulate playfulness, inventiveness and other experimental and creative behavior.
Oxfam asked us to make candytrays for their new project promoting fair chocolate. Women in chocolate supply chains face inequality, hunger and poverty. Big companies are doing little to address these problems. We tried to turn the chocolate-candy-trays in to tough and forceful fighting costumes! The trays were filled with brownies for the woman coming to the festival Where The Wild Things Are.
Cardboarders Workshops with a.o. students Mitchel van der Jagt en Sascha Dekker at the Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam! We made this stuff in one afternoon. I think the wearable city will have a follow up in the future. It’s funny to think of the wearable cardboard skyline, still standing there, somewhere in Rotterdam. Maybe covered with a bit of snow now A big shout out out to all the students that made this a very inspirational workshop! Loved the ambiance at … Continue reading
A cardboard artist often sees big piles of cardboard on the side of the road, waiting to be picked up by the cities’ recycling company. I always fantasize about the things I could make out of these piles and how much fun it would be to put these things on the street again. The artists underneath recognized that cardboard, together with concrete and glass is the most contemporary material. It’s appearance is intertwined with our everyday environment, so much that … Continue reading
We we’re thinking about typographical costumes lately (yeah, we think about that sort of stuff) so I did some research on wearable cardboard typography. We didn’t find much, we hope this post will make you help us and some good stuff will surface! First we have a gem: the video for Lushlife shot at more then 65 locations with an unbelievable large amount of typographical cardboard masks. Made by Lamar + Nik: very inspiring! This picture is on amandine … Continue reading
Klik! Animation Festival is the best animation festival in the world! Because they aim to wake the toon character living in us all! No surprise we have some tight connections with them! The saturday was our day: Building robots for a Cardboard Robot Dance Off during the Nobody Beats The Drum concert that night. There was not a lot of dancing, it ended in robot mayhem Sigh! Can’t wait for the next Klik!
For the KLIK! Animation Festival in the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam we developed this life size animation workshop. It combines our two favorite disciplines: cardboard building and animation. The theme of the festival was animated violence. As you can see.
Picnic is the first festival in the new building for the Amsterdam Filmmuseum EYE. It is the best location ever! They asked us to come and build something and when we saw these stairs we just couldn’t resist dropping something hot! So we built a Giant Cardboard Marble Run. With some help from the audience and a lot of help from Rolinka and Saskia Steur. We created it in the two days of the festival and it made several clear … Continue reading
Feast of friends is an interesting new way of approaching festivals. Everybody invited is a friend of someone invited before. Everyone invited is asked to bring something to the stage or bring something to share. We were curious how this would work out so we decided to go and do some cardboarding. We decided the theme would be “birds” and made a big tree, a videomapping, did some dj-ing and just chilled out in the sun Team: Astrid, Mathijs, Janneke … Continue reading
The KOP festival in Deventer (the Netherlands) invited us to make big cardboard heads (KOP=head in dutch). So we did and in one day we made these! On the festival we invited visitors to help us make even more big heads, too bad there was so much rain Afterwards we used the heads as decoration for the festival in the burgerweeshuis. If you like us to come to your festival and make beautiful stuff with you and the visitors, just … Continue reading
I heard someone say the Burning Man Festival is a new World Wonder. Incredible! Something with the motto “leave no trace” is now becoming a part of a list of things that only wanted to leave their trace. Like most of the artists on this site, the consciousness that everything is impermanent is a part of James Grashow’s work. We agree! Cardboard artists should claim the temporary in contemporary art! James Grashow is a sculptor and teacher of cardboard. He … Continue reading
To produce a video on a budget, production designers turn to making inexpensive props from cardboard. They are only used one time so why make them durable? Many designers fall in love with the material and sometimes decide to use it’s properties instead of hiding them. First movie is by RYAN PATRICK: a very nice clip for CUT COPY. Second one is directed by Sean Wainsteim for the band Walk of the Earth
Most pictures by Anne Mauch, Ekaterina Evdokimova! About Cardboardia’s materialization in Perm. We were invited to come and help build Cardboardia in Perm (KartonKamsk). Perm is a city with two faces: one rough, industrial and hardworking and one innocent, cultural and fun-loving. The city used to be the last stop before people deemed “undesirable” by the Soviet regime passed on their way to the gulags. Due to it’s military industry Perm was a ‘closed city’ until 1987, with population of … Continue reading
The Tyran and Mayor of Cardboardia came to Amsterdam! I (Mathijs) was very eager to meet them and talk about Cardboardia and the possibilities for cardboarders to go there. There are so many similarities with what we are trying to do. Cardboardia also uses the seemingly worthless cardboard as a material for their projects. In the process they stimulate playfulness, games and other experimental and creative behavior. Some of their projects are really big! Cardboardia is a country without land that … Continue reading
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