I went to the city of Basel on a bus with my class from the Gerrit Rietveld art school in Amsterdam. Basel sits on the banks of the Rhine river and shares a common border with Germany and France. Switzerland is one of the few countries in Europe that still has border checks as it is not part of the EU. They stopped the bus as we approached the border, but they ended up not checking us, which is a good thing because you never know what might have been found on a group of art students from Amsterdam.

Basel was the first city that I took pictures for the digital series. Looking back, I have definitely learned a lot about what to look for and how to take the pictures for the final composition. But it was still a very exiting feeling I had as I rolled out on my skateboard, with a new camera in hand, in the first of many cities to come. The city itself isn’t very large, with an old medieval center that towers over the river from the hilltop, the rest of the city flows out into the trees and surrounding hills. I did a couple of loops, starting from the center, skating down the hill to the river bank, then crossing over the couple of bridges above the river and then climbing up the backside to the center again. I ended the day meeting up with the class at the Kunstmuseum Basel to check out an exhibition from the german artist Andreas Gursky, which ended up being a timely visit, considering the project I was embarking on and proved quite inspirational.