Photo by Jacob Hansson
There’s no denying a spiritual connection between skaters in the northeastern United States and in western Europe. The seasons, the surfaces and the layouts of the cities put a lot in the middle of our Venn diagram.
And the rise of cheap, transatlantic airlines that began flying out of JFK in the 2010s only tightened our ties. Now, anyone capable of saving $500 could find themselves in Copenhagen, Malmo or Paris for not much longer of an investment (both in terms of time and money) than a flight to California would have been.
When you travel to skate, you make friends. You stay up on their edits, and having experienced a scene, you appreciate its people more. The random guy on the Nike SB German team or the kid who just started getting flowed Polar boards can suddenly become a favorite after you skate with them. They’re no longer names you don’t recognize in an avalanche of daily skate footage filmed on another continent.
In an effort to digitize this dynamic of highlighting burgeoning local talent out of Europe, our friends at Berlin’s Place magazine started a three-part, hopefully annual series called “Unsigned Hype” — a namesake obviously borrowed from The Source magazine’s taste-making column.
We are co-presenting the first installment with Oscar Säfström, an alumn from Malmö’s Bryggeriet skate school by way of Uppsala, Sweden — skating to a 2005 Song of the Summer contender from that brief slice in time when Mobb Deep was signed to 50 Cent, and coincidentally also the same summer as the release of this institution’s founding piece of scripture (which we learned last night, is still resonant in our lives.)
You can read the full feature on the Place site.
Filmed and edited by Jacob Hansson.
And thus concludes a very Euro-centric week on the QS front page.