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Traveling art exhibition showcasing decorated and transformed Moleskine notebooks

Moleskine is a rare brand whose object speaks its own language: the small black notebook, reborn in Milan in the late 1990s, carries an Italian idea of cultured simplicity—an elegant, minimal tool made to serve imagination—and it protects that analog instant when a thought meets paper and begins to take shape.

All photos courtesy of Moleskine

On the same ground stands the independent Moleskine Foundation, which treats creativity as civic energy and runs “Creativity for Social Change” programs that build critical thinking and making in places where cultural capital is fragile. Moleskine covers operating costs so external funds go fully to impact, and the Foundation works autonomously, a structure that mirrors the ethics of the notebook itself: a clear frame that frees the content it holds.

From this ethos came Detour, a traveling exhibition launched in 2006 that invites artists, architects, designers, filmmakers, musicians, and writers—sometimes students and cultural groups—to transform a notebook into an “author’s notebook,” turning a product into a medium, and a private process into a public resource. Over the years, editions from London and Paris to New York, Shanghai, Milan, and other cities have formed a living archive of more than a thousand works, a chorus that maps contemporary creativity and shows, page by page, how ideas grow through trials, erasures, returns, and leaps.

In 2025 Detour reaches Japan in two acts that reveal the project’s dialogue across cultures. Osaka, at the Italian Pavilion of Expo 2025 (from 31 July to 23 August), gathers Japanese and international figures from architecture, design, and the visual arts to show how the limits of the codex become springs for freedom. Tokyo, at 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT Gallery 3 (from 10 to 23 September) tightens the lens with forty-one notebooks, including sixteen new donations curated by Yuko Hasegawa and SKAC. It invites slow looking, where handwriting becomes drawing, an edge becomes relief, and a fold becomes structure. A collaboration with MIYAKE DESIGN STUDIO introduces NOTE-A-NOTE, which several contributors use, reminding us that tools can be prompts for encounter as well as means of execution. Free admission underscores the democratic spirit that runs through the whole initiative.

Above all stands the power of the blank page: like a painter’s canvas or the tight square of a postage stamp, the notebook’s fixed size first feels like a limit but quickly becomes a guide, a frame that unlocks endless variations. The show leaves you open-mouthed at the sheer quantity and quality of ideas rising from a simple paper notebook—some artists lay color directly on the page, letting washes set mood; some push the surface from 2D into 3D, cutting, folding, and building; some proceed by addition, enriching the book with heterogeneous protrusions and tucked-in finds; others act by subtraction, carving and erasing until form appears from what is removed—and time after time the limits of human creativity overrun any imposed boundary.

One of the strongest messages that rises from Detour Japan is the renewed importance of paper over screen and matter over digital sheen, not as nostalgia but as neuroscience. The act of writing, sketching, folding, and cutting, the very interaction of hand with notebook, appears to unlock cognitive pathways that are dulled in purely digital exchanges. As you watch pages fill with marks that are pressure, speed, friction, you feel how embodiment sharpens attention and how small material choices discipline thought. Detour invite us to return to the use of our hands as instruments for stimulating the brain and this resonates so strongly in a country that has never lost faith in the intelligence of tools.

This insistence on embodied note-making finds a contemporary echo in the collaboration between Miyake Design Office and Moleskine around NOTE-A-NOTE, a compact object that combines card case and notebook into one and that refocuses both companies on the source of creativity—writing on paper. In the words of the project itself, “A note, be it a sentence or a sketch, can capture something deeper simply because every time we put pen to paper we activate more areas of our brain”. A plain observation with large consequences, because it links etiquette and encounter—the exchange of business cards, the first impression—to the capturing of memory in a fold-out field of blankness. It proposes a tool whose expandable pockets and accordion pages reimagine the interface between social gesture and private thought, so that everyday situations can become occasions for remembering and preserving, the very spirit that animates Detour’s accumulation of author’s notebooks.

Detour in Japan also honors memory: Tokyo hosted a chapter in 2009 at the MoMA Design Store in Omotesando, already proving how turning pages collapses the distance between a finished work and its mental workshop. Today’s Osaka “symphony” and Tokyo “chamber piece” refine that promise with two scales of experience, from the expo’s open-ended energy to Gallery 3’s intimate focus, and with access for all, because access breeds agency.

This insistence on embodied note-making finds a contemporary echo in the collaboration between Miyake Design Office and Moleskine around NOTE-A-NOTE, a compact object that combines card case and notebook into one and that refocuses both companies on the source of creativity—writing on paper. In the words of the project itself, “A note, be it a sentence or a sketch, can capture something deeper simply because every time we put pen to paper we activate more areas of our brain”. A plain observation with large consequences, because it links etiquette and encounter—the exchange of business cards, the first impression—to the capturing of memory in a fold-out field of blankness. It proposes a tool whose expandable pockets and accordion pages reimagine the interface between social gesture and private thought, so that everyday situations can become occasions for remembering and preserving, the very spirit that animates Detour’s accumulation of author’s notebooks.

Detour in Japan also honors memory: Tokyo hosted a chapter in 2009 at the MoMA Design Store in Omotesando, already proving how turning pages collapses the distance between a finished work and its mental workshop. Today’s Osaka “symphony” and Tokyo “chamber piece” refine that promise with two scales of experience, from the expo’s open-ended energy to Gallery 3’s intimate focus, and with access for all, because access breeds agency.

If one line remains, let it be this: the blank page is not empty, it is a horizon. By turning notebooks into rooms where culture rehearses its futures, Detour shows that creativity is shared infrastructure and that archives can move. Stepping out of the Italian Pavilion or 21_21, the most persuasive argument is the urge you feel to open your own notebook and make a first mark; to let a simple Italian object, traveling through Japan, remind us that the shortest bridge between distant cultures is still a sheet of paper waiting to be used.