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Beautiful mountains, fjords and tiny islands out in the open sea. Those are the pictures we are used to see of my dear Norway. A few days ago, before the bombing in Oslo and the shooting at Utøya last Friday, I never expected my homeland to be the center of attention as a result of terror. As the Norwegian author Jo Nesbø put it in his article The Past is a Foreign Country, “For many years, it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months, travel the world, through coups d’état, assassinations, famines, massacres and tsunamis, and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle. It was a country where everyone’s material needs were provided for. Political consensus was overwhelming, the debates focused primarily on how to achieve the goals that everyone had already agreed on.” Of course things changed over the course of the years, from having a population where just about everyone had the same cult...

It’s been a long time coming and we’re happy to announce that they’re here: the AVANT/GARDE DIARIES. The idea behind this new digital interview magazine, is to feature creatives from around the world which share one commonality: an unconventional and extraordinary approach to their line of work. With their head quaters in New York City, the AVANT/GARDE DIARIES, a project by automobile mammuth MERCEDES-BENZ, are giving a platform to a selected number of people who share something they consider avant-garde. It is a very special honor to me, that I, too, was asked to introduce something or someone fitting that description. When it’s ready, of course I will happily share it with you. A special concept calls for a special launch, and so Mercedes-Benz has invited Raf Simons, the Belgian head designer at Jil Sander, to function as the curator to a 3-day avant-garde-festival called Transmission1, located at the Berlin Congress Center on Alexanderplatz in Berlin. More...

Today we received an email by one of our readers (thanks Annegret!) pointing out to us a wonderful opportunity to win a trip to Kenya and help promote first hand the developmental help concepts that are currently being applied in the area of Kakamega. This sub-Saharan region of Africa suffers from the age-old problems of hunger, poverty, poor maternal health, a worrysome spreading of HIV and a shortness of clean drinking water. A more recent but powerful addition to this problem pool is climate change. Humanitarian entrepreneur company Vestergaard Frandsen have partnered up with Women Deliver to tackle these problems based on an innovative model. To help spread the word about this model and the circumstances in Kenya, 2 female bloggers are being given the opportunity to win an all-expenses paid trip to Kenya where they will visit the villages in question and learn all there is to know about the problems of the region as well as the help on offer. The condition to participate is as sim...

My friend Julie from France and I wanted to volunteer somewhere this summer- the only question was – where? After a comprehensive internet research we decided to go to Guatemala. Why? Because the Mayan culture of Guatemala seemed quite interesting, it was not too far from the States (where I will be studying abroad soon) and on top of that we were offered the opportunity to travel to Belize and Mexico after our volunteer work. After some research about good places to volunteer with, we finally came across an interesting company: TRAMA Textiles in Quetzaltenango, a big Mayan city. It is a weaving organization run by women, employing about 400 females in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. The aim of TRAMA is to offer fair prices for their workers and sell their products either in their store in Quetzaltenango or via the internet,  but also to offer training to the women and maintain and develop the art, stories, designs, and textile traditions of Guatemala. The company was founde...