Encounters: Hanna Flachs – Germany
~ by Sivan Ravivo
Finally the day arrived that me and Hanna (Earthartlab on instagram) are meeting digitally. It took us a while to orchestrate this meeting because of workload, sick kids and sunny days in Portugal 😉 Hanna is a very lovely and interesting person, she is German but living between Germany and Portugal due to her relationship. We immediately connect on being artists and the kind of life that goes with it.
She just graduated from ‘Development studies’ and wrote her thesis on ‘solidarity economy’. Developing communities is also something she is very passionate about. She developed a ‘solidarity game’ like monopoly but this one is good for earth and mankind and teaches this at school to students. A kind of Solidarity monopoly she calls it. I ask her what art means to her and she says that it can be a great tool for envisioning and changing the world because to create an image is the first step to manifesting it in our head and the world. This is exactly what she does with her art, these are the messages she wants to put into the world. I love the way she paints on her iPad like she is painting in real life.
Right now she is investing a lot of time to build her illustration business and grow her network because she graduated last December. She works on different side jobs and one of them is that she does social research for a social architecture start up called Blue Temple. They are developing sustainable houses for a very low price for people in Myanmar. Very interesting indeed, soon they are doing a crowdfunding as well to finance a pilot project to provide those houses to local families.
I feel like we could talk for hours more on the world, art and being creative. She said she is really happy that I found her and her illustrations online. We are looking forward to the future and maybe see if there are other ways beside storybook that we can help each other and our communities grow.
You can meet Hanna and many other special people and their stories and images in Storybook.
