August 20, 2007
Maia Sambonet: the adventure of a word“On the morning of my departure to India in April a small parcel was waiting for me by the door. It contained Raffaella Guidobono’s invitation to contribute to the NY Detour Experience and a Moleskine notebook that was to travel with me all the way to Karnataka and back, still sealed. Throughout my time in India I wondered what kind of life would animate it. The most reasonable decision seemed to be to adopt a universal characteristic of notebooks: spontaneous philosophical wondering triggered by accidental experiences. My book is the adventure of a word thrown onto a page, embodying different narratives across three day improvisation. The word thrown onto the first page is Mu, after the Japanese 15-herb ‘wisdom’ tea which I sipped while starting the book. Mu is a Zen concept of absence-as-fullness and led me to play around with oppositions of this kind, interlacing stories such as Jonah’s descent into the abyss with the Little Mermaid’s longing for the surface. The text walks a tightrope line from page to page in a solitaire cadavre exquis. Improvisation lends to the text a life of its own, breathing wind in the sails as it embarks on an independent journey. The text becomes a performer, the page the stage where its adventures unfold”. by Maia Sambonet

Maia Sambonet: the adventure of a word

“On the morning of my departure to India in April a small parcel was waiting for me by the door. It contained Raffaella Guidobono’s invitation to contribute to the NY Detour Experience and a Moleskine notebook that was to travel with me all the way to Karnataka and back, still sealed. Throughout my time in India I wondered what kind of life would animate it. The most reasonable decision seemed to be to adopt a universal characteristic of notebooks: spontaneous philosophical wondering triggered by accidental experiences. My book is the adventure of a word thrown onto a page, embodying different narratives across three day improvisation. The word thrown onto the first page is Mu, after the Japanese 15-herb ‘wisdom’ tea which I sipped while starting the book. Mu is a Zen concept of absence-as-fullness and led me to play around with oppositions of this kind, interlacing stories such as Jonah’s descent into the abyss with the Little Mermaid’s longing for the surface. The text walks a tightrope line from page to page in a solitaire cadavre exquis. Improvisation lends to the text a life of its own, breathing wind in the sails as it embarks on an independent journey. The text becomes a performer, the page the stage where its adventures unfold”.

by Maia Sambonet

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