Joensuu DIY – Finland
This place is situated in Joensuu which is a small city in eastern Finland. This DIY spot is actually a street takeover.
This place is situated in Joensuu which is a small city in eastern Finland. This DIY spot is actually a street takeover.
The BIG OPENING of this new epic skateboarding and subculture paradise is on August 30th 2014. There will be a sick skate jam / best trick session, a photo exhibition (25 years of skateboarding in Kassel), a few bands, an after show party and of course lots of friendly, crazy, hard partying people from (hopefully) everywhere in the world.
Annual gathering of all bowl riders at Switzerland’s best spot, The Beast, on August 1st, 2014.
I think of Love and Dedication in several areas of life and I can surely identify these two feelings whenever I see them. This struck me again recently when I saw a raw space, dirty, wet and ugly, turn into an awesome indoor skateable area made with that Love and Dedication I mentioned earlier.
I guess most skaters’ dream is to settle down at some point in their lives on a property with a little bowl in the backyard, or at least some kind of private shredable terrain such as an indoor miniramp.
After the demise of the Bronson Ditch project, Clayton Graul was already on the hunt for a new location. Having participated with USP at Bronson, I was also on the hunt for a new location for them. My hunt didn’t take me deeper into the woods or another ditch off the beaten path. I was led right to my local prefab skatepark.
Under the surface of big and loud machines are popping out little places hiding much potential for skateboarding and DIY. In the little town of Flémalle, in the suburbs of Liège, a few young and highly motivated skaters explored their living environment for places of freedom and imagination.
A great adventure that started with nothing. Everybody paid for concretes bags themselves, and we build it as it comes!
No plans, no rules, just Rock’n’Roll and fun.
A few years before we found the place where we built todays little skatehall paradise including germany’s first indoor concrete bowl and a big wooden street / flow section, we had a much smaller skatehall, just a few hundred meters from our current place.
We had this small skatepark in the early 90s where we built skateable obstacles. Some neighbors complained about the noise and the city people tore it down. We didn’t have a permit to build anything but that didn’t stop us because there was no other skatepark anywhere near. We ended up building several different parks but every one of those were destroyed by the city of Helsinki….
We were cleaning up the mess of the Malinas Machinas on monday and the brewer (Frans van Craenenbroeck) comes to me and he says: ‘I bought a café with a hangar in the back. Can you come check it out and see if it’s possible to built a skatepark in there?’…
Getting old sucks. One has to get a “job”, “be responsible”, hang overs get worse, healing after slams take longer and other lame “adult” like things. What doesn’t suck about getting old: Friendships grow stronger, one can start drinking any time of the day…