Tag: Wouter Molenaar

Monday the 3rd of December marks the day that we launch the third part in our ongoing “Creating Lines” series. This one focusses on “Roffa” mainstay Marc Bolhuis and his Boombap movement. Let him explain what he did with the topic of change and how it affected his view of the Dutch metropolis.

Intro by Roland Hoogwater.
Text,film, photos & edit by Marc Bolhuis.

When “Creating Lines”,  asked me to make a skate edit about ‘change’ and what has changed in skateboarding, it immediately crossed my mind that skateboarding is such a personal thing for people. So, it is hard to say what kind of change everybody could relate too.
Recently I released my first full-length video called ‘BOOMBAP’ and ‘Metamorphoses’ is the first project that I released since the video. In BOOMBAP I wanted to portray the city of Rotterdam in the way I always saw it, coming from a village nearby I was mesmerized by the big buildings, busy streets, and grittiness that this city has to offer. In the end, Dirk Middelkoop came up with the idea of doing something about the architecture of this city. Rotterdam, for the most part, is a pretty new city because it got bombed in WW2. But there are some buildings left from the old days, buildings like our City Hall for example. We did some research on which “skate” spot is the oldest and which place is the newest, and from there we added everything in between and to make the edit in a chronological order.

It was really interesting to find out in what year some of the spots were built. I really had no clue that some of these spots have been around for so long. I was also surprised that some spots were built in the same year but look so totally different from one other architecturally.
 

Wouter de Jong, ollie.
Wouter de Jong, ollie.

Combining art and skateboarding can be very tricky and a lot of projects often slide into the trap of making artistic versions of skate obstacles.
Opperclaes created multiple public installations based on certain keywords that they saw connected to skateboarding and skateboarders.

“The project ‘Character Type’ was an intervention in the city of Rotterdam in September 2018 and bridged the gap between public art and skateboarding. The words are a homage to a skateboarding state of mind.”

Together with furniture designer Jeroen van Sluis the project came out quite nicely, to say the least.

Our favourite thing besides the skating is the fact that they first turned words into images and then images into sculptures that were then used to make this video (images) again.

But as always, don’t let us influence you to much see for yourself.

One of the many benefits of being from a small country is that it doesn’t take a long time before you are in another country. Belgium, Luxemburg, France, and even Denmark are all relatively short drives away. But even though countries like Germany are close, crossing the border makes everything look and feel slightly different. From the colour and build of the houses up to the food, everything is similar but not the same. Me being from The Netherlands but residing in Germany noticed these things when I first came here. But as time goes by, we start to accept our surroundings as they are and stop seeing things we were fascinated by a year before. So it was great to see this video pop up and notice the excitement Wouter, Pascal, Robbin and the rest of the Skatestore team must have felt at times.

Intro Roland Hoogwater.
Text Wouter Molenaar.
Photos Thomas Wieringa.
Video Marc Bolhuis.

During this Skatestore tour through Germany, we drove around, skated lots of spots, travelled to new places and drank lots of beer… A trip like this sounds like an ideal skateboard vacation doesn’t it? It was my first trip with this group of people, and we travelled to the German “Ruhr Area”, which was a pretty new place for us all. The Ruhrpott consists of a couple of old industrial cities like Dortmund, Essen and Köln. We had some excellent spot guides in the friendly folks of the Obtain Company, and they served up one spot after another. During the trip, all eleven of us stayed together bunched up in an Air BnB located in Bochum (one of Nordhrein-Westfalen biggest cities). Even though things where tight we ended up giving Sebastiaan Vijverberg his very own room because he snored too loud and we needed our beauty sleep.

We started most of our days quite early and chose a daily diet consisting of iced coffee, beer and pizza. Because of the proximity to one another, we picked a new city to skate every day, and to our surprise, we got to skate many well-variated spots in all of the cities.

As far as the skating goes, I remember some pretty crazy tricks going down pretty fast! For instance, Wouter de Jong jumped on this kinked rail that no one else wanted to touch and Shajen 360-flipped a rather large set first try. Every day we all tried our best to stack some clips. Another great thing was that we didn’t stress, sometimes we stayed at a spot for hours just because we could, other times we got kicked out tremendously fast. Either way, fun was being had the whole time. To answer my first, only and most important question; Yes, it was the ideal skateboard vacation.

Marc Bolhuis, out of Rotterdam, is working on a full-length called “BOOMBAP“. He’s already released four minutes of footage as a promo. Featuring Wouter de Jong, Yannick Witvoet, Donny Janssen, Alexander Belhadj, Remco Stolzen, Sebastiaan Vijverberg, Robert Joosten, Dirk Middelkoop, Jan Maarten Sneep, Wouter Molenaar, Tim Zom and Nassim Guammaz.

George Toland just put out this edit of him and his homies skating the Dutch harbor city of Rotterdam. Some Brits, some Dutchies skating together, doing some good tricks. With some definitive highlights by our friend Glen Fox! You should go check it out.

Featuring: Greg Conroy, Wouter Molenaar, Martijn van Velden, Glen Fox, Tom Delion, Louis Woodhead, Harry Turner, Leo Briggs and that one dutch dude.

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