Being in New York City for the first time may be worrying, fretting.
Lonely-Proof Notebooks
By Aude Milaguet
Being in New York City for the first time may be worrying, fretting. Especially when you’re a foreigner. Everything can appear so different from your own country, your own culture… the feeling of being lost isn’t so rare.
So, to counter this risk, to avoid the New York City paradox (that of feeling lonely in a city of more than 8.5 million people) and taking the opportunity to bring something new in the world of art, Jessy Baudin, a new young french artist, had a great idea. She realized that the best way to feel better, to know the Big Apple, was to share others’ experiences, because New Yorkers or visitors have already discovered the good and the bad things about New York City. They already know the places to go, the performances to see (and to avoid), etc.
So, Baudin decided to put notebooks in coffee shops, to hand them to friends, to make it her mission to ask the people of the city to fill the pages with their impressions.
In the first page of the notebooks, Jessy wrote a little of her feelings, and what she expected people to do with the books: "I’m looking for the essence of New York (…) Maybe you can tell me about the true New York? I can’t find it in travel guides! (…)". She has managed to collect a few moments of life from very different people: from different countries, from different professions, different ages (a Japanese English student wrote just after the writer Paul Auster did, for example). And this is the point. Thanks to these notebooks, we can have a variety of points of view, and we can try to compare them by countries. Isn’t it interesting to see the differences existing between the way people see things, how they record their likes or dislikes it?
Looking forward to collecting notebooks from cities all over the world, Jessy hopes people will understand her approach to the complexity existing in big urban spaces. Bringing information from very different contributors and cities will allow for a long-term understanding of the complex states of mind of people living or spending time in big cities.
Jessy always finds her inspiration and her ideas in the former work of Sophie Calle, a famous French artist known for her unexpected performances and her influence in Paul Auster’s Leviathan. Moreover, the writer gave advice to Baudin for her first trip in New York. She made a complete list of the things she would have to do to feel more a part of the City, including smiling at people, even if they don’t smile back. Another idea was to find a place she would appropriate. Sophie Calle chose a phone box and added fruits, a chair…everything to make it more comfortable. Baudin believed that all these things were very interesting, and to add something to her quest to New York, walking in the steps of her master, her model, her idol, she decided to do what she could with her humble means. And the idea of the notebooks came.
The purpose of the young artist is not personal. Rather, she would like to share the contributions with a community. She begins this exchange by creating a website where people may not only read former experiences but also write their own feelings. She deeply believes that even if the idea of the notebook is a great idea, it is not enough for the modern world: she has to adapt to the importance of Internet nowadays. Thanks to this media, she’ll be able to concern more people. As the project evolves into a new media work, it reiterates that art is not personal, is not only for the artist; rather it is for giving, for providing something new or that which is missing in others’ life. And this is absolutely what Baudin is doing with the notebooks: she brings the world, the experiences, not only to herself but to all those who will want to discover her cities in a different way.
