David Benedek Questions to ask
The ever-progressive rider is spearheading an inquisition into snowboarding’s status quo.
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David Benedek is a collector. He doesn’t stockpile stamps in his basement or fill his garage with weird little trains. Nor does he lock trophies in glass cabinets, which – considering the amount of podiums he’s topped – would just about make sense. David’s impulse to forage for something he can hold onto for all time stems from a more visceral place. He collects snowboarding. He seeks out the people that have moulded it along the way, documents the stories that have given it shape and presents the shifting sands of history in a tangible form.
You see, as well as being one of the most progressive snowboarders Germany has ever produced, David makes things. He makes movies, like In Short and 91 Words For Snow, which capture the many varied, multi-layered narratives that help make snowboarding so endlessly rad. He puts those movies out into the world through Blank Paper Studio, the production company he founded with big brother Boris and fellow pro Christoph Weber as an excuse to do all manner of cool shit. And now, satisfying another creative itch, David makes books. One book to be precise, simply titled Current State: Snowboarding – a mammoth compilation of interviews with some of snowboarding’s most influential faces – written, designed and lovingly whittled out of what the thirty-year-old terms an “obsessive snowboardish philanthropy”. You see, David makes things, so that we can have things; his collection is ours to keep.
It’s a simple motivation, but one this inquisitive doer likes to bear in mind – especially when he’s grappling with the pressures of an authorial debut. And as we realise when we meet David at his Munich base, the urge to create something you can grasp with both hands can be a powerful force.
”Over the next months, I would like to write a book about snowboarding. Kind of a status quo report in which different people that are involved in snowboarding get to talk, thus trying to make a conclusion about snowboarding’s current state. I don’t have a clue how to write a book, but I think it is going to be an interesting experience and I’m already curious about the result.“ (November 29, 2008)
HUCK: Two years have passed since you first mentioned your ambition to make a book. What has been the outcome of that initial idea?
David Benedek: A book that takes form slower than I thought it would. [Laughs] Actually it was supposed to come out at the beginning of fall, but now it’s going to be February. I think I had unrealistic expectations and underestimated that it will take a lot of time to organise all by myself – from the finances to the design, right up to the interviews.
What was the best moment during the project?
When working on any project, there are always three moments that are amazing. The moment an idea develops a life of its own – when you feel this actually could work out and all of a sudden it goes whoosh! And hundreds of new ideas pop up in your mind that are all built on this very first one. Maybe it sounds a bit cheesy, but it’s a bit like [how I imagine] you would sense greatness, or at least the potential for greatness. The second moment is when the production part is over and you put together what you have created – that anticipation of the actual result, which, on the other hand, can also be quite depressing sometimes when the product doesn’t match the expectations. Then, if you did not completely ruin it, you are soon holding something in your hands that is real – this is the moment when it’s all worth it. The moment your idea has become something real, something that you can touch. The time in between those three moments can be pretty dreadful, but you can make it from one to the other okay.
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David Benedek (text) by Melanie Schönthier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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