Avanova is a somewhat difficult thing to describe, mostly because it was never planned properly in the first place.
It grew.
It grew out of things we made, things we found, people we met, places we lived, articles I wrote, photographs I took and ideas that refused to disappear again. Some of those things became a business, some became stories, some ended up in drawers for fifteen years before resurfacing here.
What connects them is probably quite simple: we like things that have a person behind them.
Made by somebody
A handmade object is interesting to us not merely because it is handmade. Somebody had to learn how to make it. Somebody chose the material, made mistakes, developed a technique, sat there for hours and eventually produced something that did not exist before.
That effort matters.
Over the years we have had the privilege of working with artists, craftspeople and small workshops, particularly in Vietnam. Some became business partners, some friends, and quite often the distinction became rather blurry.
The articles in People & Craft are about them and their work. They are not anonymous examples of traditional crafts collected from the internet. These are people we actually know, objects we have held in our hands, workshops we have visited and stories that became part of our own.
Somewhere between Austria and Vietnam
Home, for us, stretches rather inconveniently across Eurasia.
One end is Salzburg in Austria. The other reaches through China and Southeast Asia to Vietnam, where our family has roots and where a considerable part of Avanova's history began. Over the years we have travelled those routes often enough that the usual distinction between “here” and “there” has become increasingly unhelpful.
Austria is home. Vietnam is home too. China left its fingerprints all over the place. Japan wanders in whenever tea is involved. Somewhere in between are thousands of kilometres of history, food, languages, people, landscapes and ideas that continue to fascinate us.
Avanova lives somewhere along that road.
Writing things down
I have been writing for almost as long as I have been able to read. Indeed my first written story was the ending of a book I didn't like and decided to re-write when I was eight years old. Some of my writings were published in magazines, some were written simply because a subject interested me, and some should probably never have escaped into public view in the first place.
The better survivors live in Writing.
Among them is My Coffee Adventure, originally written while I was living in Vietnam and working for a magazine and a speciality coffee company simultaneously, and the very German Konversationen des Schwarzmagiers, which I have absolutely no intention of translating because much of the joke would die somewhere between the languages.
There is also an archive. It exists for things that no longer define Avanova but are still too good, too strange or too personal to throw away.
And then there is Anrun
Anrun is the fictional side of Avanova and, increasingly, a world of its own.
It began with stories and grew into novels, characters, histories, places and an unreasonable amount of background lore. Unlike the crafts and travel writing, none of it actually happened, which has never stopped it from demanding almost as much research.
Over time this part of the site will grow with revised stories, excerpts, lore and probably a few doors that do not lead quite where a sensible website designer would have put them.
RealiTea
And because apparently writing, art and imaginary worlds were not enough, we also run a tea house.
RealiTea is our physical shop and tea house in Salzburg, while realitea.eu is where our increasingly excessive interest in tea has found its own home.
This separation is intentional. Avanova does not need to explain every tea-growing region on Earth, and RealiTea does not need to contain twenty years of our accumulated creative archaeology.
What Avanova is
So Avanova is not really a magazine, an online shop, an art project or a personal website.
It has been all of those things at various points, and traces of them remain.
Today I prefer a simpler definition:
Avanova is a home for things we make, people whose work we appreciate, places and cultures that became part of our lives, and stories we think are worth telling.
That is broad enough. The internet already has an encyclopedia.