The Slow Fashion Award 2010 is awarded for the third time. We spoke with participating designers about their view on sustainable fashion.

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Choosing the organic eggs off the shelf, eating locally grown apples, drinking fair trade coffee, going without strawberries in December—by now, these are things we take for granted. Is it due to our awareness of climate change? Perhaps. Or maybe we are looking to shift gears - to slow down and live more sustainably. more »

In the last few years, the boundaries between interior decoration, art, and design have begun to blur. Within this trend, each discipline contributes its own unique qualities. This direction has resulted in a combination of presenting individual artistic vision and adjusting to the demands of the market. One can describe this phenomenon as a kind of product-building exchange between the senders and the recipients - for which, in our case, the model rooms serve as the means of communication.

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The history of Viennese model rooms goes back several centuries. The beginnings of example-setting ideal spaces were already emerging in the second half of the seventeenth century. The first attempts focused on the careful selection of materials, then furnishings were added gradually, such as furniture and lighting. Industrial development, economic progress, and improved quality of living cleared the way for individual expression. more »

A grid-like strut frame, constructed out of several vertical and horizontal aluminum rods, stands in the space, and is held both together and upright by means of a chaotic network of wide black rubber bands with no visible beginning or end. The sculpture conveys a precarious stability, based on workings of gravity, traction, pressure, and friction. Bringing attention to the forces that constitute a work is a central concern of the artist, Michael Kienzer. Through the methods of interlacing, interweaving, and extensive tension, he creates links, references, connections between things and materials, and thereby reveals the fact that it is not the elements themselves, but the mutual relations between the elements—what is formed in between—that represents the character of a work.

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Kienzer completed his degree at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Graz and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he studied sculpture under Bruno Gironcoli. For his work—which has received numerous awards, among them the Monsignore Otto Mauer Award—he uses various media; for objects, installations, and designs, he takes different approaches to themes such as space, time, surface, compression, materiality, image, and the original. His sculptural interventions are mostly site-specific, working within the means of a given space. For example, in a lapidary fashion, two aluminum plates are set up straight across a space, supported only by themselves and the walls, drawing attention to the physical forces at work, therby shifting them, and changing the viewer’s perspective of the structures, which at first appear unalterable. more »

Oil on canvas, drawings, texts, performances: one must work hard on compiling the techniques of artistic expression, says the Vienna-based artist Tomak. Contentment leads to comfort. But those who only want to please others do not create art, as they are not willing to sail the upwind course.

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To want to advance and to be able to persist against harsh winds are both foundations of his artistic self-positioning. Art which earns the right to be called art arises from both strength and sensitivity. One must be hard and ready to fight against inertia, to be able to separate the weak from the strong. Tomak demands this attitude from himself and expects it from others. Surrender to contentment? “Why not produce something questionable, something disturbing? Off to war!” more »