Detour Book

Detour Book
A collection of sketches celebrating the gesture of hand drawing and hand writing
and the value of notebooking in the creative professions of today. With a contribution
by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and an excerpt from Richard Sennet’s “The Craftsman”.
Worldwide preview at the 13. International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale,
November 5th, 2012.
Detour is the name of a travelling project which, since 2006, has
gathered and displayed, in various cities around the world, 275
notebooks decorated, hacked, sketched in and filled with notes,
clippings and drawings by internationally renowned authors
from different professional and cultural backgrounds. Now
Detour is also the name of a Book, collecting images from the
notebooks in the Detour archive so far.
All Detour works have been donated by the authors to the nonprofit Foundation lettera27 , whose mission is to support the
right to literacy, education, and the access to knowledge and
information.
The Detour Travelling Show.
Detour is a hands on experience, as the notebook are displayed
inside Perspex boxes, keeping them safe, while letting the public
have an unusual chance to flip through their pages. The aspect
of actually touching the book and interacting with it, let the
spectators get closer to the creative process of the author.
Detour is also a permanent exhibition, with flick-through-videos
that anyone can browse on moleskine.com/detour.
Moleskine made a project where the interdisciplinary approach
is a must, involving a very diverse group of authors from all
sorts of creative professions: visual artists, film directors,
musicians, writers, critics, illustrators, graphic novelists, from all
over the world. In each city local authors have been involved,
making the collection richer and richer. The Detour stops so far:
London in 2006, New York in 2007, Paris and Berlin in 2008,
Istanbul and Tokyo in 2009, Venice and Shanghai in 2010.
Detour is on ongoing project. Next stop: Sao Paulo, in 2013.
The Detour Book.
This book is a physical archive. Having the whole collection of
almost 300 notebooks, make you feel that you are looking into
the makings of other books. The Detour Book contains a series of
maps, infographics and statistics. The sections divided into 5 big
macro areas contains texts written with greater freedom around
the subject of notebooking by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Lorin H. Stein,
Maria Sebregondi, Maurizio Ferraris, Raffaella Guidobono, and
excerpts from The Craftsman by Richard Sennett and from The
Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell.
Han Bing
“The book layout – says editor Raffaella Guidobono -, made together with the
studio Zetalab, is a canny concept, with simple and effective graphics. We wish
we could classify works in a Natural History Museum, in a Borges style. The
Book instead is a new way of how to present the notebooks as a parade of
objects sometimes with the joy of Paradox. To develop a Moleskine volume as
an excursus on the big cultural project Detour, we emphasize the research on
the creative process that goes from the drafts symphony of Barenboim’s pupil
Karim Said up to the stunning Joep Van Lieshout one”.
Through the Detour Book the reader can recognize true talented minds like
Tishani Doshi, Javier Marìas, Tom Sachs, Ron Arad, Italo Rota, Toyo Ito and
some rising, daring, fresh souls like the Architectural Studios Kuehn Malvezzi,
unexpected drawings by Dave Eggers, the gifted designers Ross Lovegrove, the
paper doll shape of the Tord Boontje's notebook, as well as some influencers
like
Spike Jonze, Antonio Marras, Sigur Rós, Yves Béhar, Erina Matsui and Giovanni
Sollima, just to name a few.
The Detour Book will be first presented in Venice, for the 13. International Architecture
Exhibition, on November 5, in a talk with Maria Sebregondi and Raffaella Guidobono, at
the Serra dei Giardini, via Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1254.
Liselotte Watkins
Sebastiano Mauri
Colophon
Publisher: Moleskine Srl
Editor: Raffaella Guidobono
Texts: Maurizio Ferraris
Raffaella Guidobono
Hans-Ulrich Obrist
Maria Sebregondi
Lorin H. Stein
All other texts by Raffaella Guidobono
Excerpts: Padgett Powell
Richard Sennett
Graphic Design
Zetalab Milano
Publishing Coordinator: Igor Salmi
Toyo Ito
Paula Scher
The edition contains a
352-page book, printed
on ivory coloured paper,
with more than 250
illustrations.
The book is cloth-bound,
mounted with black
cardboard
and white cloth on the
spine + elastic band.
Please credits photos: Moleskine®- Detour Book
For updates and hi-res images:
Silvia Trenta - silvia.trenta@moleskine.com
T.+39 0200680530
Rodrigo Almeida