THE BIRTH OF INFERNO

Bobi and I met at a small contest in London. Like many others, I had been a fan of his skating for half a decade. Meeting in person, we bonded over a few shared ideals, our sobriety, and our similar approaches to making edits.

I appreciate humility and authenticity above all else. Bobi embodies these two adjectives in full. He is as comfortable with a beginner skater as he is talking to the legends. He is more fully a representation of our culture than many of the “pros” I know, who are more concerned with their image than interacting with the next generation.

He is also the hardest-working skater I have ever met.

After London, the idea of a trip to Israel was floated a few times. I bought my tickets on a whim; a few stressful weeks of work combined with the Dutch winter left me desperate for a break. I headed to Tel Aviv with the goal of shooting photos for Bobi's pro skate edit and giving feedback on the overall filming process.

This was the first time I took a skate trip without the intention of filming a full-length section myself. My sole mission was to document the process of creation that was happening around me rather than focus on my own skating.

I had more fun than I had in years. The same fulfillment that I felt from getting a clip still existed, but with me on the other side of the lens. The act of documenting the creation of Bobi's part was more rewarding than any of the personal edits I worked on in 2021.

To watch Bobi skate is to be given a rare view into the process of someone who is willing to work - quite literally all day - to achieve his vision. For him, he is alive to skate, and this shows in everything he creates. Skating lives in him in a way that a fellow addict can see goes beyond interest or joy, to a place of deep need and burning passion. Watching him skate, in many ways, I found a brother.

Suffice it to say, that when he mentioned wanting to create a media brand, one that could celebrate the different scenes of skating without being bogged down by brand names, teams, and trends, I jumped at the opportunity to help him bring this vision to life.

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Inferno in the specific form you're seeing it now was born in Tel Aviv. It came about after many nights of post-street-session discussions. We spent hours talking about the things we felt were missing from the culture, the people we thought lacked opportunities, the content we are still hyped on from the past, and our shared desire to do more, to give back, to create something new and exciting.

These organic private conversions felt like they demanded a public platform.

Bobi knew that he wanted to make something and he had a vision for the feel, the merch, the mission. I had a specific vision for the content and the aesthetic, the voice. He knew that whatever he did, he wanted to travel to new places and make content with new people. He wanted to share the community of skating without any of the usual sponsors and egos that tend to get in the way.

After those first discussions, it became clear that we both held parts to the same puzzle.

On my return flight to The Netherlands, I couldn't stop taking notes. I had my phone out the entire journey, feverishly tapping in ideas, roadmaps, collaborations, brand values. The ideas flowed into me the same way that the vision for a skate video always does - both with great force and a gentle, self-affirming confidence.

It was clear that Bobi and I both wanted to use our shared obsessive passion to bring something new to the table. This idea morphed and evolved over subsequent weeks of WhatsApp chats, endless research and ideation, screenshots, and video links.

What started out as an amorphous idea of traveling and making videos became the sharp and definitive goal of creating a media company where Bobi could create anything he wanted while shining the light on others. To give a voice to skating as a whole, without the confining structure of a formal brand.

In that way, Inferno is an extension of the brotherhood of skating and filming in the streets together.

I have always struggled with what to name projects like this. I confessed this struggle to Bobi during one of our last nights in Tel Aviv. Nonchalantly, he turned to me and said, "I've always wanted to call something Inferno."

At that exact second, I could already see this moment, when I would be writing the launch post for his project, for INFERNO, on the train as I head to London to shoot and skate for the intro video.

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The beauty of skating is the people we meet and the connections we share. Having been a skater for all my adult life, I often forget how complex it can be to form friendships of value outside of skating. This inclusive-community mindset is something that is unique not just in action sports, but in life in general. It is a very rare thing that we all help to develop and spread with every authentic interaction we share with another skater.

The partnership between Bobi and I is a constant reminder of this community and the impossibility of its connections. The fact that a skater from a rough part of Tel Aviv and a skater from middle-of-nowhere Arizona can work together to create a project like this is not something to be taken lightly. It fills me with reverence when I contemplate how lucky I am to be a part of a world that makes this possible.

This reverence for community is what we want to share with our fellow skaters.

A big part of skating is dealing with fear. It's learning to know the difference between plainly being afraid and your gut telling you something is wrong.

Inferno is us learning to deal with that fear outside of skating. It is us taking what we have learned and trying to put it into words and content and videos to share with our audience, to create something that we can all be proud of, that we can all create together through our shared love of skating.

I hope you enjoy what Bobi and I have created. I know that in the coming months and years, Inferno will change and evolve in ways that we can't predict now. Some control has to be released to accept this, to see it for the nebulous thing that it is, to know that in the future it will grow beyond our minuscule idea of it. That it will exist outside of our own obsessive and blinding passion.

That's part of the excitement. I can't wait to see what Bobi builds with the foundation that we have laid together.

As always,

Cody L.
Co-creator of Inferno