HELVETICA BOLD is an online Swiss LifeStyle magazine—your portal to the Swiss influx of culture. You don't have to be Swiss or of Swiss descent to enjoy this magazine—a native curiousity about other cultures will suffice...LIVE + DIRECT IN HELVETICA BOLD THIS MONTH:
POLITICAL THEATER: PROTOKOLL BY CHRISTIAN LUTZ
Over the course of three years, Geneva based photographer, Christian Lutz travelled with members of the Swiss diplomatic corp in an official capacity. His own ambiguous relationship to power ("part attraction, part repulsion") reflected through the camera lens captured a dimension of diplomacy he calls "political theater". The result is PROTOKOLL, a handsome pictorial study of authority, power and hierarchal systems...
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THE NEW FACE OF SWITZERLAND
Thabo Sefolosha, NBA rising star is not your typical NBA rising star. He's part Swiss and part South African: born on Lake Geneva, raised in Montreux; lived in five countries, fluent in three languages, plays a mean shooting guard for the NBA, reads Paul Auster, listens to Method Man...
He's 23 and for Switzerland, a country with centuries of diversity under its belt— he represents the new guard.
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THE TROUBLE WITH FONDUE
"Everyone got it? If you lose your piece of bread in the fondue, you pay a forfeit! The first time it's five of the best with a stick; the second time you get twenty lashes with a whip; the the third time you get thrown into the lake with weights tied to your feet!"
—Fondue scene from Asterix in Switzerland
Fondue is probably the national dish most associated with Switzerland and the easiest to provoke the ire of any Swiss gastronome— given the wrong context. We talked to our favorite culinary expert, Adrian Iten, about all things fondue—and in turn got a breakdown of Swiss culture via its most famous dish...
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ZEN AND THE ART OF MAGAZINE PUBLISHING
There's a School of Visual Arts subway ad with a tag-line that says something like "Follow your passion" beneath an impressionist painting of an empty bank tell. The bank teller's nameplate reads "Paul Gauguin". You might remember Paul Gauguin, the French modernist painter worked in a bank till he was thirty-five, then left it all behind to become an artist. He moved to Tahiti where he lived out his days painting exotic landscapes and women. Here's the Swiss version:
Stefan Jermann did a three year apprenticeship at a bank in Bern (the Swiss capital), then moved to Los Angeles to further his business studies. There he was lured into a life of photography and eventually found himself at the Art College Center of Design in Pasadena. He focused on his new found passion as well as magazine design. Here's the departure from the French story: he returns to Switzerland, lands in Zurich, teams up with Walter Stähli, an art director. Together they form TRUCE a magazine that somehow defies "magazine-ness", but somehow also fulfills it.
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THE YEAR IN MOMENTS
If you click on the "Links" menu item of the Swiss Institute (New York) website, you'll find yourself at once thrust into the curatorial sensibilities of Gianni Jetzer. The links are formatted along the lines of "Top Ten Lists" and toy with the often baffling correspondences of expression found on the internet. These top ten lists also reveal a fascination with the architecture of the everyday.
Helvetica Bold met up with Gianni Jetzer to take stock of his time so far as Director of the Swiss Institute, New York.
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THE SWISS MIX
Andra Borlo channels an ethereal avant pop fueled by woodwind and strings —and the voice of an edgy enchantress; Eliane strums acoustic guitar, her voice wafting over latin percussion with the knowing silky precision of a bossanova princess. They are both Swiss, both New Yorkers, both working musicians with an impressive array of collaborators spanning the realms of rock and jazz. When they join forces it's a Swiss Mix called Swiss Miss where an adventurous brouhaha of Swiss folk tunes come unraveled into a mélange of blues, reggae, jazz—and who knows what else? We caught up with Eliane one half of the Misses after they got back from doing a tour of Arizona and California...
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CAPE OF ZURICH
Zurich's best kept secret is its diversity. Like any other major European city, it is the crossroads, melting pot, meeting grounds for a plethora of world-travelers, nomads, emigrés, immigrants, bohemians, dissidents... Nowhere is this more apparent than Zurich Horn, the very tip of the City that juts out into the Lake.
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LOS ANGELES, NEW YORK, BASEL, HIROSHIMA...
Basel, Switzerland in the 70s, Silvio Caduff, artist and owner of the Erste Mini-Galerie had a little advertising trick to lure passersby into his gallery space: he would remove the menus inside menu boxes outside of restaurants and replace them with paintings—so that people walking by could "watch" the paintings that were in the gallery. The curious invention no doubt formed a deep impression on his young nephew, Giacun. As we fast forward nearly thirty years later, Giacun Caduff, now an indie-filmmaker living in Los Angeles, has come up with a similar device to help promote a different sort of medium—short film.
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STAGING DELICATE MATTERSDiplomacy is mostly an intangible thing, so when Andreas Spillman—the new Director of the Landesmuseum, Zurich— told his team he wanted to mount an exhibition about Swiss diplomacy, they were presented with a daunting task, "because diplomacy is not something you can actually see" says Pascale Meyer, the show's curator "and also because there are so few objects and so few pictures documenting it." They started with an historical overview. According to Meyer: " We chose different stages in history which were important diplomatic steps Switzerland took. And then we thought about creating an atmosphere which would bring it to the public."
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