Fortune Rio Amazonas

The series celebrates the value of the simple and the natural, like drinking water or crafted things. It is an important matter for us to stress out the essential. The pictures of selected waters of the earth are traditionally engraved on a specially designed water carafe. At Vienna Design Week 2010 21 Austrian lakes, rivers and glaciers have been presented, in April 2011 21 international waters will be shown for the first time at Milan. Each item of a series is numbered consecutively. Also custom designs are possible. The user should devolop a personal relation with the item.

At POETRY HAPPENS Mark Braun is going to show the installation Fortune together with the well known austrian company J. & L. Lobmeyr — a collaborationwhich was initiated by viennadesignweek in 2010. Fortune celebrates the value of the simple and the natural, like water or crafted things. 21 pieces of a specially designed glass carafe will be en- graved with the image of a specific body of water of this world.
J. & L. Lobmeyr has been working with the material glass for almost 200 ye- ars and continues until this day to rely on handcrafted perfection in creating its chandeliers and other lighting objects, its hand-blown and hand-cut crystal, and decorative glass. Starting from the Lob- meyr tradition of personalising glass objects with engraving or decorating them with eloquent patterns or ‘paintings’, Mark Braun has realised this series with the emphasis on water on the one hand, and glass on the other.
Using three different processes of engraving, archetypical water carafes especially designed for this project have been decorated with the outlines of lakes, rivers, and glaciers of this world. For Mark Braun the sum total of these makes up the symbol of the essential ‘fortune’ of everyday life. Graphic designer Anna Sartorius created postcards showing each lake, ri- ver and glacier with images from Google Earth and information comparing the area of water with the amount of time the en- graving took.
As a symbol for the international each water is named in english and in the national language.