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“Delivering as one”

Published by gertrud

Corporate teambuilding mosaic for United Nations Regional Coordination Office, Beijing

Dear Ms. Muller,
On behalf of the UN Country team in China, I wish to express my sincere gratitude for your contributions to our recently concluded retreat in Beijing. The preparation of the mosaic was one of the highlights of our program. All participants joined the activity with great enthusiasm and were most grateful for the opportunity to work with you and your team. The mosaic will make a most impressive addition to our office and provide tangible evidence of what can be achieved when working together…..

Siddhardt Chatterjee, UN resident coordinator, 07 June 2021

 

In May 2021 MosaicMoments was commissioned to engage 30 heads of UN agencies in a mosaic making session with the aim to experience each other in a totally different activity compared with their usual interactions via emails, phone calls and meetings.
The output was to be a mosaic made out of 30 squares for the staircase of the newly renovated building of the Regional Coordination Office.The client asked to depict the new UN slogan “Delivering as one” in the design as well as using the color codes for the UN publication materials.

Design by Kersten von Sohlern

MosaicMoments team prepared glass materials, work boards and tools for 30 workstations and transformed one of the meeting rooms into a mosaic workshop.The location was the Chun Hui Yuan Resort at the fringe of Beijing City where the retreat was taking place.

During the 2h workshop the participants broke material into tesserae and assembled the colorful glass squares into random letters and patterns, not knowing about the overall design, which wasn’t revealed to the crowd.

After one hour of quiet diligent work everyone got together in the center of the room and started to make sense of the letters randomly put together.

The slogan was guessed fast by one of the young female participants.

Feedback was extremely positive about the effect of immersing into colors and being completely taken away from business thought but yet contributing to a beautiful outcome that will decorate the work environment.

In June MosaicMoments team installed the mosaic at the building of the UNRCO’s office.

 

The infamous Beijing Motorcycle

Published by gertrud

Is it an owl? Is it a bear? It’s a Beijing moto!

What would you expect a group of seasoned Beijingers to be doing on a sunny Saturday afternoon? At Mosaic Moments studio, a banker, a baker, a jewelry maker… and a few other friends met to assemble a much talked-about mosaic made up of 5000 colored glass tiles and in so doing slowly revealed it’s secret motif – a familiar icon on the streets of Beijing.  

For the mosaic master, Gertrud Müller, the suspense was heightened by not knowing whether the new photographic pixel technique she was experimenting with would produce a clearly recognizable motif. “My greatest challenge was to see if the image will emerge using linear andamento (rows of tiles) instead of the sculpted lines of classical mosaic,” Müller said. 

The photographic pixel technique is a recent innovation by contemporary German artist Thomas Denker. He designed a computer program to render a digital photograph as color-coded pixels that correspond to the color chart of a well-known tesserae (mosaic tile) factory in Italy. Located in Beijing, things are not always straightforward. “I’d decided to use only local material and of course, the tiles available here are not an exact match for those in Italy. It was quite a task to find the right match!” 

With Denker’s help Müller transformed a photo collage of her motif into 18 worksheets that made up the bigger mosaic. Müller and her team prepared an individual material kit for each worksheet to ensure the final outcome would resemble the original photo collage as closely as possible. “So, it was quite unexpected that although the worksheets limited creativity to some extent, people still found individual ways of approaching their work, task,” Müller said. 

On the big day, the mosaic makers immersed themselves in a silent, contemplative work mode. Thoughts of daily routine quickly faded, and they all became captivated by the emerging, yet abstract shapes in front of them. After three hours of focused work and a hearty lunch prepared by snack chef Martin Raiser, the mosaic master had reason to smile. As she assembled the worksheets one-by-one and the race to guess the icon became rowdy, it all finally fell into place: The infamous Beijing motorcycle dressed in winter gear! (text Annalize Heyns)

Making of the infamous Beijing motorcycle dressed in winter gear - click on the photo!

Project 116 preparations

Published by gertrud

Many of you reading the previous blog asked about the preparations. Yes it took a lot of preparations and a lot of time to make this community mosaic event happen.

Typical Beijing scooter in his winter outfit

The idea to turn one of my first impressions of Beijing into a mosaic lingered in my head already for more than one year. Meeting Thomas Denker at the joined BAMM (British Association of Mosaic Artists ) And DOMO e.V. (Deutsche Organisation für Mosaikkunst) in York 2019 and getting to know his very interesting computer generated photo mosaics, gave me the idea to try and use this technique for a mosaic produced by a team. After a few playful trials during spring 2020 it turned November when I seriously started to develop the designs with my assistant Zhu Shui. She helped with her photoshop skills to make the photo collage – a caricature of a typical Beijing scooter set in front of a landmark building in Beijing, the Wanjing SoHo.

In December 2020 Thomas in Frankfurt rendered the image into 18 pixallated mosaic segments and produced the color chart and material lists for each segment.

In January 21 after finding all the 116 shades of colors in my material stock (this took me about one week going through all the glass mosaic tiles I have) 9 volunteers helped cutting the tiles into 5000 pieces.

Video clip about sorting and cutting material

The two project assistants Zhu Shui and Yuan Hang assembled most of the material boxes counting out 426 tesserae for each box in up to 60 different colors per box and helped preparing the work boards with the numbered sheets for each segment.

Thanks to the beautiful words of editor and marketing specialist Annalize Heyns places filled within half a day.

The day before the “mosaic happening” my friend Barbara helped with her practical glance to arrange tables and chairs so that 18 workstations were arranged in my studio waiting for the 21 participants to come.