ONE OF THE HOTTEST DATES DURING THIS YEAR’S ART BASEL – THE PRESTIGIOUS ANNUAL LAUFEN TALKS IN COLLABORATION WITH BRAND NEW WORLD – SURPASSED ALL EXPECTATIONS

The much-anticipated 3rd installment of “Architecture during Art” at the world famous LAUFEN FORUM in Laufen, near Basel, Switzerland, surpassed all expectations, according to visitors.

With six of “The Greatest Creative Minds of the 21st Century” stirring up an unprecedented discussion about the future of the creative industries, business, networking, entrepreneurship, all the way to future life on earth, the talks ended with standing ovations to Marcus Fairs of dezeen.com / UK, Kai Uwe Bergman of BIG / USA, Zuzanna Skalska of 360inspiration / NL, Christoph da la Fontaine of Dante – Goods and Bads / DE, Ido Garini of Studio Apettit / IL and Thanos Argyropuolos, of the Marina Abramovic Institute / USA.

Guided by the moderating whirling dervish Jovan Jelovac of Brand New World’s fame, Laufen’s high profile audience consisting of global opinion leaders in architecture, art, design and business from over 30 countries all over the world, whom only an occasion like the Art Basel can bring together, enjoyed an arguably once-in-a-lifetime roller-coaster of ideas and inspirations in the packed auditorium.

That is, only after successfully negotiating its way to the auditorium location itself, as they first had to pass the ingenious interactive food experience installations designed by Studio Apettit’s mastermind Ido Garini. Taking Laufen’s own diamond SaphirKeramik shapes as inspiration, Studio Appettit prepared a whole range of stunning food delights provoking all senses, and seriously endangering the start of the talks in the process, as the exited audience could not stop to discover new meanings and definitions of food – in color, taste, shape, consumption…

The evening was opened by Laufens dynamic global business duo – Alberto Magrans, Senior Managing Director Laufen Bathrooms AG, and Marc Viardot, Laufen’s Director of Marketing and Products, underlining once more how Laufen’s own high corporate culture simply calls for not only involvement in aspirational thinking and networking surrounding Art Basel, but even demands to generate own events such as this one, carefully tailor made to answer the most sophisticated needs of its customers and partners, the Swiss community and the worldwide creative and business class Laufen caters to.

“Our arts programs are a long-term effort to create a corporate culture that inspires innovation and intelligent risk-taking, that we see as keys to our business success.”, said Laufen’s Marc Viardot.

“The Marina Abramovic Institute project is ready not only to change the future of the performing arts, but also to change the very course of art itself” explained Athanasios Argyropoulos, Managing Director of Marina Abramovic Institute (MAI), opening the talks session. He outlined his more than ambitious plan of how to secure this fragile, intangible cultural asset for the benefit of mankind, while making sure to develop a completely new framework to educate and inspire future generations of artists and researchers.

The audience was hungry for more information from a brilliant team that attracted over 400.000 visitors to both MoMA in NY and the Serpentine’s Gallery in London respectively, as well as over 100.000 spectators and 18.000 participants of workshops in Sao Paolo recently. We wouldn’t expect anything less than world domination from Marina.

“BIG is ready to save New York City from the next big flood with its resiliency plan “The Dry-line,” to protect 10 miles of Manhattan’s coastline.”, said Kai-Uwe Bergmann, Partner at BIG, taking his part to outline the world’s immediate future to the stunned audience at the Laufen Forum. BIG is commissioned to create a flood barrier disguised as a park, and already secured the funding for the first part.

“The key to the project is that people will not notice the flood barrier is there, as a flood wall that separates the life of the city from the water. When you go there you’ll see landscape, you’ll see pavilions, but all of this will secretly be the infrastructure that protects Manhattan from flooding.”

In an exceptionally emotional speech, arguably the strongest of the evening, Marcus Fairs taught the audience how he launched Dezeen and what mistakes he learned, and is still learning, from the nine years process of inventing dezeen.com, the leading global architecture and design web-platform that now attracts over 2 million readers a month.

Marcus strongly encouraged everyone “..that now is the best time to take their destinies into their own hands, as new technologies, enabling networking and communication like never before in history, are empowering even the smallest new market entry with previously unimaginable business superpowers.”

In Brand New Worlds signature quest to confront an aspirational audience with a maximally changing set of perspectives from speakers, Jovan Jelovac called Christoph de la Fontaine of Dante – Goods and Beds to take the microphone as next. Christoph successfully illustrated Marcus Fairs’ previous thesis about taking the destiny in one’s one hands and not waiting for success to fall from the skies.

“We started our studio amidst the biggest crisis in the furniture industry, and everybody told us we must be mad. But what seemed to be the biggest threat to the established brands, proved to be the biggest opportunity to us, as suddenly we had access to world’s best suppliers and manufacturers who otherwise wouldn’t have time for us. We couldn’t even that easy inspire initial interest from partners and media with our small budget”. The rest is – four year old – history of a successfully launched new brand, which now stands on the frontier of defending smartness and beauty in classic object design.

Next accomplished designer and chef Ido Garini of Studio Appétit charmed the audience with his hypnotic imagery of food, where he explored uncharted territories of the power of eating design to create and enhance multi-sensory experiences, products and objects.

Ido Garini proclaimed that “..the key to innovation is inspiration, and inspiration is triggered more than anything by emotion. To experience something, is to feel it. So the best way to create emotion is by challenging new experiences”. That was an easy sell to an audience that went through Ido’s masterpieces already a whole yummy hour before the talk, and continued so happily in the apres-talks time.

Closing the presentations part, the driving force behind 360 Inspiration’s trend research, Zuzanna Skalska, declared that “… Design is Dead, long love Design!”. Zusanna’s keynote speech, delivered in her signature |witchcraft| style, left the audience completely exasperated, fearing at moments for their own jobs, if not their own lives in the immediate future, but also drawing an unmistakably clear path to solve the accumulating problems of future generations.

We have witness volcano eruptions with less impact on audiences than Zuzanne’s lecture… The ensuing panel discussion with all speakers underlined one more time in what a crucial and historic momentum the creative industries and the wide field of architecture and design are today. The steep development of the technologies and the diversity of the creative industries has become an incentive to develop experimental, stimulating programs in which different, independent disciplines coexist in order to stimulate an ever-changing, evolving intellectual process.

As the proverbial icing on the cake of the evening, Laufen made an additional effort to substantiate the thinking of several International designers speaking tonight, presenting their masterpieces inside the Laufen Forum during the whole duration of the Art Basel.

A specially designed set up of the BRAND NEW WORLD exhibition from MIlano Saloni 2015 designed by Dante, included TOM STRALA and ADRIEN ROVERO from Switzerland, REINIER BOSCH and CRISTINA WILCKE from Holland, ILAN GARIBI FOR GAL GAON COLLECTION from Israel and DANTE – Goods And Bads from Germany. The centerpiece of the installation proved to be Dante’s own creative interpretation of Laufen’s SaphirKeramik thinking, framed with the world premiere of the BNW Milano 2015 movie.

The last farewell was reserved for our ingenious curators:

“Brand New World is delighted to present the latest global creative perspectives in form of our signature roller-coaster ride of ideas and arguments. Design today is much more than just a tool for the achievement of profits and economic success. It as a carefully crafted methodology for the introduction and realization of new ideas to our society.” said Vesna and Jovan Jelovac at the end of another hot global Brand New World evening.

Stay tuned and welcome to join us in our next Brand New World adventures, somewhere in the world near you!