The ‘Terra Incognita’ Project: An Artifact Book
This book, part of the “Terra Incognita” project, marks a return to sensory experience, in which the world is perceived through volume and density rather than through the flatness of a digital image. Here, the absence of a ready-made “picture” becomes a tool: it stimulates the imagination and our inner memory of our contact with reality.
This is an artefact that has been deliberately stripped of its rigid, traditional binding. By eschewing a fixed form, the act of reading is transformed into a ritual of exploration, in which the cover and the block of pages exist as distinct yet interconnected elements, united by a single concept.
Materials: handmade paper with plant impressions, natural suede, waxed thread, engraved hardboard, wood stain, tung oil, wood.
• Cover and spine: The cover is made from hardboard, whose deep texture is brought out by a wood stain and preserved with tung oil. The oil highlights the material’s fibres and makes it feel warm and alive to the touch. The surface of the cover is covered with hand-engraved plant motifs. This process leaves ‘scars’ on the material, transforming its natural form into a permanent record. A curved tree branch, firmly sewn to the cover with waxed thread, replaces the traditional spine, turning the book into an archaic instrument and a sacred vessel.
• Connecting element: Soft, natural suede in a deep green colour acts as a tactile bridge. It gently separates and simultaneously binds the hard cover and the delicate paper interior, serving as a connecting fabric between the different materials and textures.
• Inner section: The pages are made from hand-made paper with a grassy hue, created using plant fibres. They preserve the physical imprints of plants—not an illustration of the living thing, but its materialised trace. We interpret this ‘text’ through the rhythm of the surface and its tactile presence. The sheets are bound with waxed thread, whose contrasting stitches create a graphic, rhythmic pattern.
“Terra Incognita” is a book that invites us to engage directly with matter, bypassing visual noise and awakening those modes of perception that remember the world through touch, form and the resistance of the material. It becomes an object of meditation, where every detail — from a rough engraving to a delicate imprint — serves as a means of exploring the “unknown land” within us and around us
A unique item; there is only one of its kind.
