Welcome to Detour, the digital exhibit.

                         Christian Lacroix, Fashion Designer  - Detour 2008, Paris
A digital exhibit to browse through on video, with more than 250 original notebooks that have been decorated, hacked and transformed into sculptures or graphic novels, filled with notes, sketches, clippings, paintings and drawings. The artists come from diverse backgrounds, representing all those creative professions that consider the notebook a helpful ally in their profession: musicians, art critics, directors, visual artists, industrial designers, fashion designers, architects, photographers. In the digital version of Detour, each notebook is presented in photograph and video: a hand leafs through the notebook accompanying the viewer in the discovery of its contents. The concept of each notebook is presented as the exhibition follows the stops along its creative journey. More than just a digital exhibit, Detour is also a real show that travels the world. London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Istanbul, Tokyo, Venice e Shanghai. These are the cities that have hosted the event over the years.
  


Curated by Raffaella Guidobono, Detour is both a visual and tactile experience. As in the digital version of the exhibit, the public has the opportunity to leaf through the notebooks -- wearing special cotton gloves -- to follow the artist's creative process as it unfolds, one page after another. Director Mike Figgis fills a notebook with notes written on little pieces of paper, old photographs and clippings from his films. The notebook of Maira Kalman is marked by 7 pairs of shoes, as if to tell the story of a slow walk on tiptoe. Abigail Hunt retraces the long path of the Thames on accordion-folded pages. Sketches in pencil and highlighter, portraits of women, furniture designs and objects fill the notebook of Karim Rashid. The many different notebooks on display include, in particular, those by Giuseppe Amato, Ron Arad, Martí Guixé, Yves Behar, Ross Lovegrove, Antonio Marras, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Karim Said, Valerio Berruti, Giovanni Sollima, Zhang Yuan and many more. 



The notebooks in the Detour collection have been donated by the authors to lettera27, a non-profit foundation that promotes the right to education and access to knowledge. lettera27 manages the notebook archive and makes the notebooks available for Detour events organized by Moleskine around the world.