Senyores i senyors, moltes gràcies per l’oportunitat de parlar amb vosaltres avui.
… you asked about my roots:
Growing up in East Germany behind the Iron Curtain ups cycling has been always a big part of my life. Punt fix de la meva infància was the home of my grandmother and grandfather, who happened to be an artist. In 1946  he took part in the Fundació de l’associació d’artistes  and 1948  he founded the  so called Brandenburg art school, escola de pintura estatal, que ara és una universitat tècnica i art.  

It was so much easier for us in 2012 to found an art school  than it was after the war. Later as a parent, I was astonished to understand that art was as big a need as hunger for food for him. First he used coal of the cooking oven, the kitchen fire – carbó del foc de la cuina?-  to draw on the backside of photo paper or the blank paes of books. Lacking the right material in East Germany was not only during the forties and fifties but a problem throughout the GDR.  There was molta improvisació… Of course, we didn’t call upcycling back then, not even recycling,  but so much paper was used on both sides or reused, most pieces of furniture, curtain fabric or leather transformed. Especially the prewar stuff highly valued. My grandmother was a seamstress and my nicest dresses were embroidered with laces and silk shreds from the 1920s. It was kind of DrapArt, as I understand it now.  Maybe outmoded, but still lovelier than the brand new dresses you could buy in GDR fashion stores. It wasn’t only that people hadn’t so much money, it was that they couldn’t buy anything decent for it.  Due to a certain poorness, a limited range of available items  East Germans kept in general everything as long as possible and tried to repair it, to sell or swap. This was great fuel for creativity and art.