The idea is to die young as late as possible. — Ashley Montagu — Wednesday September 18th — —

“What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.” Greil Marcus — Wednesday September 18th — —

I love listening. It is one of the only spaces where you can be still and moved at the same time. — Nayyirah Waheed — Wednesday September 18th — —

Together & Dassemus & Andreas Samuelsson

Finding more togetherness

During the pandemic, in search of more togetherness, we collaborated with Jordi Carles Subirà and started a little online network which we named Together&. In the last few months, we evolved a few elements in this endeavour to explore if there’s a real potential to upgrade it to a proactive professional network for collaboration and co-creation. Our end goal would be to actively assemble like-minds, in search of resonance between people, projects, products and (freelance) client work. At this point it still lives mostly online, but it will break out of that digital domain more and more in the future to come. For our first (network-only) edition released under the label, we connected the exceptional bio-dynamic Vineyard Dassemus with artist Andreas Samuelsson’s stripped-down essence.

Together, they resulted in a new creation we love. An organic red sparkling wine—made according to the traditional method in a small village in the south of the Netherlands—paired with the outstanding, impactful, and fluid aesthetic of Andreas Samuelsson from Gothenburg, Sweden. A refreshing, fruity, and nutty taste featuring a hand-pulled screen print on the bottle by the analog print studio Kapitaal in Utrecht. In the composition of these elements, you’ll find everything we appreciate and aspire to with Together&.

Andreas Samuelsson

Andreas Samuelsson works as an artist in a poetic graphic manner. He has worked with most major publications in the world (New York Times, Spiegel, La Republica, Forbes, Apartamento etc) and with many famous international brands (Nike, Flos, Volvo, Apple, Kiehls, Aesop etc). With his seemingly stripped-down images, he makes the complicated simple and the simple a little more complicated by exploring, challenging and contrasting the representative, associative and concrete properties of line, surface and shape.

“I constantly work with the circle as a starting point and try to capture the simplest expression. Being able to delete and add details to create a clearer image than the original image. The more I work with my forms, the more I realize that a sea of impressions opens up. I collect images along the way, capture sections in the moment and fill in with my thoughts on how this might look visually.”

Vineyard Dassemus

Vineyard Dassemus is located in Chaam, a small village in the southern Dutch province of Brabant. The inspirational endeavor of Ron Langeveld (theoretical Mathematics graduate) and his partner Monique van der Goes (former lawyer/director in the judiciary sector), is named after a hamlet in the close surroundings of the village and originally started with one hectare on Ron’s parents’ land in 2005.

Today, the vineyard spans six hectares and is certified organic and since August 2021 bio-dynamic certified. While having been involved throughout the years, from 2023, Monique, became a full-time participant in the business after having said goodbye to a long career in law that mostly took place in the European quarters of Brussels. Together, Ron and Monique are a delightful duo that combine an infectious passion for and wide knowledge of the craft of winemaking and the inherent consequences of their choices to do this completely in harmony with nature. They inspired us with both specialities.

“You work all year towards that ultimate goal: the harvest. And that never gets boring, as you’re a farmer, half a chemist in the wine cellar and then you have to sell it too. Every year is different, you keep discovering. […] Ron and I want to work as naturally as possible and therefore don’t use pesticides, not even those allowed in organic viticulture. So, we planted “PIWIs”, new hybrid grape varieties that offer protection against fungal diseases, such as the white souvignier gris, solaris and the red cabernet cortis. In the end we still had bad years, because some turned out not to be resistant after all. You don’t know for sure until about eight years later, so then we uprooted some and planted new vines.”

Looking back, we realized there was more than just the endproduct. After visiting the vineyard a few time we also absorbed some substantial things about bio-dynamic wine farming, that we try to incorporate in some of the things we do ourselves.

Things we learned while visiting the vineyard

– It takes focusing on the small things to see how great you are doing locally.
– It takes keeping it real (rather than overpromising) to appreciate what you can actually do.
– It takes slowness to truly experience how you are growing organically.
– It takes a strong conviction to do what you believe is right.
– It takes setting your own standards to create in harmony with nature.
– It takes wide acceptance to see how the seasons treat you.
– It takes a level of isolation to continue the road you are on.
– It takes creativity to keep growing into a scale that meets your ambition.
– It takes passion to do what you love.
– It takes continuously reengaging with what you love (which might evolve over the years) to be passionate in life.
– While, it also takes love to be able to let it go, and let it be.