“We are often misunderstood!” says Daniel Josefsohn, looking out of the window: “It’s already been written that we create fashion or that we’re a group of designers. That’s a load of nonsense, of course!”
It is Thursday afternoon. It is cool in the studio of the Berlin photographer, but outside the sun is shining. In the back yard the dog Jesus lies yawning at the Berlin sky. Inside, creative chaos reigns. On the desk are piles of sketches and notes, on the sofa books and open magazines. There are photographs on the walls.
“We” means the Berlin artists’ group “Elternhaus” which was founded nine years ago in Hamburg and evolved out of the group “Maegde und Knechte”. They see themselves as “suppliers of thought patterns” – as re-thinkers, new thinkers, oblique thinkers, as workers with and in the mind, as vehicles of attitude. Their showroom is the street, their medium, language. The materials: textiles, plastics and other “idea carriers”.
It all began with old ex-army surplus clothes which the Elternhaus embroidered with slogans and printed with stencilled lettering. For example: “Please call back, Frau Oberfeldwebel”, “Prada Meinhoff”, or “German draught”. Soon came T shirts, pockets and knitted pullovers, then sticky tape, caps, pads, plastic tags with texts and stamps – with slogans and emblems that are sometimes clever, sometimes confused, sometimes cryptic: “Even before 12”, “Work makes work”, “Thinking was yesterday”, or “Kraut”, “Elite community of yearning and fallacy”, “Looked after on the inside”, or “Every man is his own country”.
The Elternhaus is a country in itself, almost a terra incognita – at least as far as the structure of the group is concerned. “We think of ourselves as a family in spirit”, says Josefsohn. By this he means the artists C.L. Antonczyk and Tetjus Tügel (mother and father), Stefanie “Steffus” Mayr (daughter and boss), Dr. Eck (adoptive son) and himself (son). Plus of course “ghost workers, craft workers, workers”, in short – the extended “family” directly involved in the manufacture of the Elternhaus products and who hand sew, knit, embroider and print T shirts piece by piece: mainly in the Hamburg “headquarters” which is also the “development site”. But also in the back room of the Elternhaus shop on the Alten Schoenhauser Strasse in Berlin. What is produced there is wholly incompatible with the mass market. And yet the ideas of the Elternhaus have been spreading well beyond the Berlin area: for half a year now the group has been represented in Dover Street Market, London, one of the best-known designer-fashion locations in the world. And even lately in Paris one hears more and more the word “Eltern-‘aus”. For the “family” has launched a perfume onto the market, jointly with Mark Buxton, the top perfumer with Symrise.
A piece of creative solidarity: “Josefsohn is insane. Just as insane as I am”, Mark Buxton affirms, looking back at the immediate sympathy he had for the daring project: to create a fragrance aimed at reconciling the great religions with each other. A nasal diplomacy which “dispels enmity”. An olfactory pamphlet for peace. The idea was that from every culture a typical fragrance note could be applied. It suited the apparently unpronounceable name given to it “MoslBuddJewChristHinDao”. In this word creation, Tetjus Tügel, years before on seeing the collapsing towers of the New York World Trade Center, united the all great religions of the world in abbreviated form. The Elternhaus “mother” CL then had the idea of transforming this word creation into a fragrance – and explained the idea to the Symrise perfumer Buxton.
Symrise perfumer Mark Buxton“When Mark agreed to make the perfume for us in his private time, I howled with delight for two days”, Josefsohn recalls. “I mean – we had no budget!” The first samples came soon after conceptual discussions and mutual visits to Spree and Seine. Parcels with fragrance samples journeyed from Paris to Berlin and these were thoroughly discussed “in the family” on a democratic basis. “Each of us wanted to add his own twopenceworth”, grinned Josefsohn. “But somehow we decided: that’s enough. Mark is the professional. When he says: ‘That’s it!’ – then that’s our perfume.” Something of an olfactory infatuation was the result: “The fragrance should have something to do with cooking, with spices. But it should also contain incense and allow the association with spirituality to come through”, says Mark Buxton. Other ingredients are blackcurrant, basil, everlasting flower, labdanum, maté, rose, gaïac, black pepper, vetiver, sandalwood, cedarwood, patchouli, musk and ambergris.
“That was fantastic work”, enthuses Mark Buxton, wellknown for his ideas, who, apart from famous perfumes for Givenchy, Chopard, Cartier or Versace, also creates fragrances for the fashion label Comme des Garçons, which smell of “a big black swimming pool with black water at night”. “You were able to be creative – regardless of anything. Freedom was given no limits.”
In order to give the fragrance a worthy wrapper, Daniel Josefsohn and his wife the architect Susan Raupach found a justly fitting form for the heavyweight theme: the simple perfume bottle sits inside a two part, cubic, white concrete sculpture. To implement this idea, Josefsohn and Raupach found support at the chair of Bernd Hillemeier, professor of building materials at the Technical University of Berlin, who had developed the mixture for the black stele of the Holocaust Monument in Berlin. The two concrete components are held together by four magnets moulded into the concrete.
So – an exciting business? With anything the Elternhaus is involved in it is just the opposite. The fragrance has a “calming effect even on atheists and non-smokers” writes Tetjus Tügel, author of many Elternhaus texts, in the enclosed leaflet. It is a fragrance to counter “party-political and party-religious blinkered attitudes that are continually provoking violence”. And indeed, anywhere in the world. And so Josefsohn then set off on the promotional campaign – leaving Moslems, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Hindus and Taoists sniffing at the “unifaith” fragrance: the first advert shows two orthodox Jews at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem – obviously wowed by the idea and the scent – photographed by Josefsohn.
Will its message get through? Who knows. The German Art Directors Club this year distinguished the packing with the Bronze Medal for Packaging Design. And the website – for which the German artist Carsten Nicolai, alias Alva Noto, contributed the sound, is clicked around the world. (www.moslbuddjewchristhindao.com).
The perfume works on “cosmic, aesthetic and sensual” planes, according to Elternhaus. In order to free the phial from the concrete shell and get to the fragrance, however, a lot and little are needed at the same time: the first, a light “turn to the left or the right”. The second, “a great deal of open-mindedness”!
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