The book has been traveling with Zsuzsanna from the first moment:
“I was on the Boston to New York Chinatown bus in late 2018, when János and I brainstormed about what format our collaboration should take. We had a shared interests in books, but what kind of book can hold our many sided two worlds? Even thought I grew up in Hungary, 22 years is a fair distance and János had never been in the US. Before getting to New York, we had already settled on the titles: Productive Misreadings | Termékeny félreértés.
Transit times were my most productive “office” times, especially back when I split my schedule between New York and Boston, with weekly bus rides. This otherwise useless in-between time had became an essential part of my practice. Afterwards, these in between times extended to trips between Israel and Eastern Europe. The book, in its raw form, had visited Croatia, Italy, Austria, and France. A year later the last pages were finished in New York and were finalized and made press ready in Boston. Only then was I finally able to see it as a whole on a large monitor (and approve) what we had made. Until then I was viewing it on my laptop with impossible light conditions, as I was working on it in cafes, libraries, bars, museums, on the shore overlooking the Mediterranean sea, then the Adriatic and the Venetian Lagoon, or simply in my family’s and friend’s backyards. Basically wherever I was, the book traveled with me. The pages lived in the cloud, on my laptop, were exchanged back and forth between us, evolving, just as conversations get carried out in a chat window. I could have found a proper place to work in, but this project was not about perfection. Instead, the book was about capturing our reactions to each other, responding on another, in a dialogue that naturally also recorded the environment. These environments and conditions had supported and at times limited the process, and we had let these all be seen.
At the end, our book recorded interactions between an artist and a poet over a year-and-a-half long journey. Moving in and out of our comfort zones to be able to respond to each other without adhering to the limitations of the medium, language, time shifts, or geographic locations.
We developed a fresh take on how we can collaborate while apart.
Szentannapuszta, Hungary
