 last event before our afternoon break we are going to have an experiential interlude. Is that right? Okay, well tell us when you get here. This is an intervention by Sophie Krir who is organized today. I think she's done a wonderful job and I'd like to give her a round of applause before she comes up onto the stage. So my name is in Luxembourg, I guess you would say Sophie Krir, that's how my grandmother says it, because my roots are here actually in Luxembourg. My father and my grandparents come from Estonar and you see me here standing on the terrace of the former boutique Krir of my grandparents who were a hat maker and tailor in the Rue de la Gare and it's actually I've grown up in Holland though and my mother tongue is French and somehow now recently in the last five to eight years I've been doing projects here also in Luxembourg related to my work to design and it's actually very exciting thing to as a sort of outsider insider also be here today and be allowed I guess also to talk to you and I'm very glad about that we have this day to talk about what we want to talk. My practice is based in Rotterdam and it's I guess a lot of the things I do whether they are conferences or books or designing exhibitions the scenography for exhibitions it's always about bringing content together trying to edit stories into a narrative that has a certain shape so that's why I combine design film and writing in my practice and for this research for the symposium when Anna Loporkaro asked me and this is actually nearly over a years ago by now so you can tell how much time goes into preparing a day like this when she first approached me would you like to organize to put together a symposium in the context of this B&L of design here in Luxembourg I got very excited immediately because I thought okay this is my chance now to actually drive on all those roads that I don't usually take and to really find out what's going on here actually in terms of design here in Luxembourg because up till now my relationship with Luxembourg was more family wise and not so designerly wise so this mind map you saw it also on the flyer and it kind of summarizes the field trips that I took last fall together with Jean Schiltz and Yann Glasse of Luxe Innovation we went to visit quite a few enterprises and quite a few also represented here today especially in the sessions of this afternoon and also in the films that you see that you can see in the Café of the Mudam but what came out of all those talks which were all about you know how do you see design how do you use design within your enterprise how do you feel design is perceived within the society here in Luxembourg and where do you see opportunities and where do you see obstacles these are just a few sort of thoughts that came out and that for me I mapped in this way so for me what's really an essential asset and it was mentioned already before by Charles Landry as well is the geographical and the cultural crossroad position of Luxembourg it's it's really quite incredible that from here you go to Germany to France to Belgium and it all happens very fast and in Holland's if I'm at a party and I switch from French to Dutch to German or not and my German is actually quite bad or to English people think they would say I still you need am that's a Dutch word saying you know don't don't brag but if you go to a party here in Luxembourg everybody does that everybody switches language all the time and it's I'm not sure everybody is conscious of this enormous richness of just knowing somehow having at least three languages for most of you and in many cases four or five inside your mind every language is a culture every language is a mentality so you have here an enormous richness I think the dot EU feeling yeah that the dot EU thing I think is also if you look at the because I dived also a little bit in for instance the Kirchberg you know how is the Kirchberg initiated and developed and the fact that it houses the European institutions the mediator role there that Luxembourg plays that that that's another very interesting thing about Luxembourg but I'm not going to tell you everything about this man I just want to focus on one part of it for this for my small interlude here and it's actually the part on the right where I'm talking about the 21st century cosmopolitan village question mark because the network here the reason is so dense like it seems like everybody knows everybody this is in a way it can be an advantage because you get things done you know the lines are short like in a village it can be disadvantage because if everybody knows everybody everybody who is knows what everybody's doing and for instance to give an example when Anna Bernagotsi arrived yesterday night by train I didn't know what time a train arrived and Stephanie from Superette who was at the opening with us told me oh yes my friend is next to her sitting in the train so somebody from Luxembourg already knew when Anna was arriving and I didn't even know so this is already saying something so I want to talk about networking and I want to talk about networking in another way than maybe networking is usually talked about as a lobby thing or as a business thing I want to talk about networking literally so I have a little one minute instruction networking instruction movie with some sound for you so all this work to make one half mesh if you know that and you look at these kind of fishing nets you suddenly realize okay so that's how long it takes to actually make a connection to make a working net in this case a fishing net and for me it's another it's not I think a coincidence that this image even though we're looking at fishing nets here it's not that far away from for instance images you know of the internet as a network or images you know of how the brain connections work so for me networking and making contact it's that's where actually everything starts and that's why I want to zoom in on this today so how do you make a network work and also the very exciting and dynamic panel of Hans Fenheuser before we were lobbying we were giving points to set things in motion these girls in Nepal they also found a way to collaborate to make the really heavy work I mean they're smiling but the work is really not funny at all to make that really funny to make that work sorry less heavy and what I it's again it's an again a network it's again she's holding a string which helps to pull up the shovel of the girl on the right which makes the the lifting of the stones for them less heavy so if you want if you start if a network starts to come in motion it gets a dynamic of its own and the experiential part will be that we will try this out at the end of my talk so when you make a contact whether you meet a person when you touch something or even saying something every word I'm saying it's some it's already some kind of new product out in the world I I think it's so I'm zooming in even more from the speech of Anna before these are coins in a huge Buddha sculpture in Japan that people put in the in the scenes of the of the Buddha and they put it there as as charms I guess and I think maybe that's how we should look at ourselves within our own network within our own risot whether it's a personal or family network or it's your business network I I don't believe in these rules in that sense I think we're all persons and what what is your intervention in that network what do you what is the charm that you insert in the network that you are part of and how does that inspire and also put that network in motion so what happens when you actually make contact probably all of you have done this before when you put your hands like this and you let them come really close to each other but very very slowly and you have to close your eyes to actually feel it really well at some point more or less here you start to feel this enormous vibration between your your hand palms that's that's I guess the closest we can come to understanding the feeling of what happens inside our our body because when we have nerve ends and there's a synapse in between nerve ends and when we get attached to something the chemical reaction occurs and our synapses actually get locked into each other so every contact is literally a connection every contact you make in the world that's why breaking up is so hard because you have to actually cut through that nerve and by the way so here I was doing an exercise with students where we were trying to figure out how your individual position in a network and this is what's actually what I had in mind for you here today but looking at the space I realized not ideal the way we're sitting so we're going to do something else but everybody is holding two sticks and you can imagine that if they are trying to move like this which they did they were moving around you have to push and pull and at the same time know if somebody else is pushing and pulling so you are you're a node in the network but you are also an actant you're acting as well as being acted upon and I think that that position is maybe something very important to be aware of whatever your status is whatever your power is whether if you've got 20 lobby cards or one lobby card you're still acting on somebody or on something or on a policy and also being acted upon so what is your what is your water which I think if you are working as a designer as an enterprise whatever you always need to also sort of see beneath reality you need to learn to read the codes of reality and the water which is one of those things that you used to sort of sense at least I tried it this summer I don't know if it actually worked something moved I don't know if it was the water in me or the water in the earth but something moved and there was actually a water canal passing there underneath but it's interesting this idea that yeah everything is connected you know we're all actually made out of water basically it's not that different and not that category it's not maybe not so interesting to also label everything so much but if you've got your own water which to see beneath reality you can start to read signs in cities around you and this can help you to define what you what you should do as a designer or as an enterprise and especially what you shown soon do what's necessary and what's not necessary so for instance this is in Casablanca and the car there broke down and all it needs to stop the really crazy chaotic traffic of Casablanca is that broken crate the apple the plastic bag and the red jerrycan that's enough to make a barricade they don't need the black and the red and white stripe they don't need any of that and I stayed there for half an hour because I didn't believe it because I I nearly got killed in the traffic there but so the crazy crazy traffic still stops for the small crate that's a that's a contradiction but if you notice that then you also know okay so the crazy traffic has a structure it's just that I cannot read it apparently I for me it's chaos for them it's actually a working system so everything you do sets something in motion even when you don't do something you're actually contributing to how the world is is moving on so what does it mean to move a rock is a kind of question I often ask myself I don't know why I'm fascinated with rocks and in this place it's quite interesting actually with all the stone around but and there are some crazy projects around in the world like Michael Heiser an artist in America who just moved the biggest rock of the world and he had to design a whole truck for it to move that rock and and everybody's fascinated with that project so somehow we're in a big universe but moving rocks it fascinates us but moving a rock from lying down to standing up can be the difference also already between life and death so this is for instance a desert close to a village and the standing upstones are places where people have been buried and the lying down ones are just the rocks in the landscape and that's that's just you just tilt something and you make already such a big difference and I'm very much for that you know I'm very much for kind of zooming in and finding out what is the essence of what you're trying to do and what does it take to do that how much or how little is necessary to do and lastly I would like to talk about this Varda which is in in Iceland an old also again with rocks an old wayfinding system you you pile up rocks on top of each other and the one rock one side has a rock taken out and then you know that that's the north and this wayfinding system if you think of it as a network it's really interesting because it guides people through the landscape it's made by the people because everybody who walks by there will also maintain it so maintenance is embedded in it and the kind of tacit knowledge because you have to understand the the codes of it to know how it works but the first time I saw it I just saw a rock I didn't know about this compass element for instance so we started with the networking and I'm ending with the star constellation and it's all the same it's dots and connected lines and the mind map was also dots and connected lines and so for me that's also a bit my point that everything comes down to yeah the network that you build around you and especially and not the network I guess for opportunistic reasons in the sense of just contacts for the sake of contacts or just friends for the sake of friends like you see sometimes happening on facebook no I think it's really important to understand that with every person you connect to a possible project or a possible something can be set in motion and so lastly I would just try one thing because then Tracey will invite us to the the lunch break and you're not all sitting next to each other which I had kind of hoped but some of you are so I would like the ones of you that are sitting next to each other to see if you can lock your elbows into each other so like you just lock your elbows inside the elbows of the person next to you yeah you're doing good the first one is doing very good so the idea is and this is a this is a very easy trick if you move synchronized it's super light if you don't move synchronized it's going to be a mess so it's about moving synchronized and it's about all wanting the same thing which is getting up but to practice that pull on each other's elbows pull on each other's elbows all of you do you feel the strength okay so we're not okay don't stretch it so I'm going to count to three and at three you pull the elbows and you all get up and you won't need to lean on the chairs okay one two three