Station One

If on a winter’s night a traveler

In chapter one, a stranger enters a train station carrying a suitcase with contents he cannot wait to be rid of. This man is Calvino's traveler. Almost everything about this man remains a mystery. We are not told who he is, where he is going, or why the suitcase he carries is important to him. This uncertainty is irresistible. We long to know what happens next. 

Visitors to Station One will receive a basic description of the form of the exhibition and instructions about how to proceed though the ten stations. However, they will not receive a full explanation of how the exhibition pairs literary strategies with experiential strategies. My goal is to spark curiosity and a desire to explore the next stages of the exhibition.

Station Two

Outside the town of Malbork

In chapter two, a farm boy meditates on home and memory as he prepares to leave for dangerous new surroundings. Calvino describes a writing technique that pairs each character with a specific kitchen utensil. As we are introduced to each person, they are described in relation to a particular cooking task, like pounding meat or curling butter. This pairing of task and character helps us differentiate between the characters and give us clues about their destiny.

At Station Three, I ask visitors to take part in this process by associating themselves with a kitchen utensil. Implements will be available to them and they will be asked to choose the one they most identify with. This implement will stay with them and be used at a future station.

Station Three

Leaning from the steep slope

In chapter three, a frail young man recovering from an illness in a seaside town meets an artist who draws seashells and has a secret. The young man has a sense of doom hanging over him that he cannot define. He forms a friendship with the artist but is unable to see how her actions might place him in danger.

In Station Three, the visitor advances, in good faith, to read the text provided and gaze at the window. They will not immediately realize that I have positioned them under a giant grappling hook, a symbol of the danger that the protagonist has wandered into.

Station Four

Without fear of wind or vertigo

In chapter four, a trio of friends in a city recovering from war navigate their allegiances to their newly formed country and to each other. Calvino uses vertigo as a metaphor for the disorientation that his characters feel after a series of revolutions has upended their lives. Imagery of the clouds racing overhead gives the sense that events are happening too quickly for the characters, or the reader, to fully process.

In Station Four, I ask visitors to pause and look up at three specific points while descending a set of stairs. When visitors look up, the slices of imagery will come together, and they will see clouds that are only visible from that vantage point.

Station Five

Looks down in the gathering shadow

In chapter five, a crook reminisces about his sordid past while attempting to dispose of a corpse. The criminal narrator references events that are outside of the main body of the narrative. We are left with the impression that this is not a story, but a complex network of stories that are layered to become, as Calvino says, "something like a forest that extends in all directions."

In station five, visitors will form their own forest of stories. They will tie the kitchen utensil that they chose at Station Two to a piece of string. Then they will hang the string from a net that is suspended overhead, thus adding their own, individual stories to the network.

Station Six

In a network of lines that enlace 

Chapter six is about a professor with a compulsion to answer any phone that rings, though he knows that the call is likely not for him. He answers a call in a strange house and receives an urgent request for a ransom payment. 

Station Six draws visitors around a corner in the same way that the narrator is drawn to the ringing phone. A series of panels mounted along the walls of a hallway form an image if they are viewed from exactly the right vantage point. Like the ringing phone, the urge to complete the image drives the action forward.

Station Seven

In a network of lines that intersect

In chapter seven, a businessman develops a complicated strategy to avoid being kidnapped and becomes ensnared in his own net. The narrator is obsessed with optical illusions. He has defended himself by constructing a mirror world that distorts reality. The text swerves between reality and illusions.

Station Seven also forces visitors to question what is real and what is an illusion. Forms have been placed on the floor that, when viewed in the mirrored tube, become an image of the narrator’s adversaries closing in. When the visitor gazes at their reflection in the mirrored tube, they will be pursued by the illusion of these enemies.

Conclusions

Each of Calvino’s incipits has a different trick up its sleeve. These tricks invite us to place ourselves in the work. In Traveler: Ten Meditations on Italo Calvino’s Literary Worlds, I created a series of experiences that allow viewers to move through these incipits in physical space. My goal has been to explore the nature of reading and the nature of exhibitions. It is my hope that the exhibition will entertain, but I also hope that it will open a new conversation in design thinking. The study of literature could hold many lessons for exhibition designers. How can we use the carefully created experiences that we find in fiction to inform the experiences we design in physical space?