rainer and martino

The story…
…and that’s how it all started: We, Martino and Rainer were asked to give the guys who ran DesignersBlock a hand. In return, they offered us a space in the exhibition so we could show our work. We were really happy despite not really having planned a show. We collected all our work that deserved to be seen in public, carried it to our space in the Jam Factory and arranged it there. We were really happy with the result, only the lighting situation wasn’t quite how it should have been. There was more than a day until the opening, hence not to much to worry about. After some thinking we decided to come up with a light ourselves.
After some desperate efforts to vacuum form plastic with the help of the vacuum cleaner and the oven we discovered ‘the’ football in a corner of our small workshop. Then things developed fast. We took out one panel of the ball, removed the bladder inside and cut a hole for the cable. Then we connected the cable to a socket and put a bulb inside. The result made us smile. A lot. And after testing a little while we put in a cold light source to reduce the heat and put it into our exhibition space. The football became ‘the’ little star of our show and it was pretty clear that this was just the start.
We went to East London to check out some wholesalers selling footballs. Thinking that it was easy to go into production. Pretty soon we realised that our ‘the’ ball was the only one glowing so beautifully. We contacted all the big football producers, trying to find out about the very material of our ball. Not much luck. We met one of the last football stitchers in the UK, who stitched balls for all the big english clubs in the 70’s. He could not really help, although it was great to have met him.
Then we found Heinz from Switzerland who could finally help us. He was interested in the project and open minded about it. We had 120 balls made to our specifications and with an especially laminated material that he had suggested. The 120 light balls arrived and it was a little tricky to get them stay round. But for the worldcup in 2002 they were ready and we put up an instalation in the Design Museum. Now that we have sold all the lights we are producing a new, more beautiful, more glowing light for 2006. With Heinz again and with some black suede.