Welcome back to our weekly Place Presents series, today we are traveling to Freiburg but with a twist. A lemon twist? The chefs might ask. The real answer is that this is not in fact, a German video in the sense that many other videos we present are. Why we are so adamant about that change is represented in the text by DTNE’s maker below. Have a fun read!
Intro by Roland Hoogwater.
Film, Edit & Text by Eduardo Pastoriz Herrmann.
Hello, my name is Eduardo Pastoriz Herrmann, I am from Brazil and I’m 21 years old. Skateboarding is everything to me and it is what gave me the most things in my life, I’m so grateful for all of it.
My life in Brazil was really hard, I never had the opportunity to do the things I would like to do… actually, I never knew what I wanted to do! Brazil is a place that messes you up when you don’t have a lot of money. It takes all your dreams away and makes you think that you don’t have any other option besides being a slave to the system living in bad conditions. So many times I found myself in a situation where a gun was being pointed at the middle of my face either by the police or just some random trying to steal from me. This is a really normal situation in the city that I come from. Porto Alegre means “The Happy Port” but in reality, it is actually really hard to be happy in that city.
When I was young my parents decided that they both wanted to follow different paths, both my siblings and myself stayed with my dad in Porto Alegre. My mom fell in love with a German man and ended up moving to Germany when I was about 5 years old. In the beginning, her not being there fucked with me! At that time I could not see that in the future her moving to Europe would open up the biggest opportunity of my life for me. That moment finally came when I moved to Germany at 16 years of age.
“So many times I found myself in a situation where a gun was being pointed at the middle of my face…”
Eduardo Pastoriz Herrmann, 2023.
When I moved from Brazil to Germany, I made two friends Tom and Chrissy. All I wanted was to film something with them, the way that they skate is just it! Chrissy will skate everything that looks like a good spot in a really creative way and Tom will skate everything that looks like a shit spot in a really creative way. They’re really opposites in their approach so I was sure that making a video around them would be the best way I could get something out of the Freiburg skate scene. The problem with the skateboarding scene in Freiburg is, that we don’t have that many skaters, and the skaters we do have are not well-connected or motivated. Besides that, we don’t have a lot of spots! This makes most people want to do their own thing and that usually isn’t skating… It was really hard at the beginning to bring people together and go film something at certain spots! Then I got to a point where I realized that I should stick with Tom and Chrissy. In the end, we often went skating alone. It was just me and them and my camera, we got the best that we could get and had the most fun that we could in the last year and a half 🙂
To end this text, I want to give a few shout-outs: Lucas Donnet, Louanne Borchardt, Sebastian Hartung, and Christian Bluemle, those 4 made me fall in love with filming and taught me so much about cameras! Christopher Hellstern and Tom Gerber made me interested in documenting somebodies skating, their style is the best, and they are both my favorite skaters, I love to watch them do their thing.
The result of all of this is the DTNE project, which is short for DrinkTheNagelackEntferner. A skate video featuring Tom Gerber and Christopher Hellstern filmed and edited by me Eduardo Herrmann, I hope you guys enjoy it!
“Chrissy will skate everything that looks like a good spot in a really creative way and Tom will skate everything that looks like a shit spot in a really creative way.”
Eduardo Pastoriz Herrmann, 2023.