Encyclopedia Book / Off Track / 2017

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Off Track

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2017. 3 - 4

The winter of 2015, I travelled alone in Europe for 2 months. Time spent on trains composed a big part of my memory. On each trip, I sat and waited for the next destination approaching. The train, a heterotopian, gathered a group of people taking an inevitable and absurd pause.

The publication overlaps the observation of my life trajectory at that time and the trains'. To look back at that experience, after 2 years of dramatic change in my life, the editing and design of this publication reorganize my thoughts and revealed an another interpretation.

Off Track, meaning that I was on track, but off track in my life (foreign languages, off-campus, major-changing, away from friends and family, ...). I want to show the confusion, the feeling of being outsiders not only in where I traveled to but also where I belong, the "off" timing and space physically and metaphysically, and the energy I gain from the trip in this book. Therefore, I organize the things I want to include in these four major parts:

Off Track

On Track (facts of the journey, pictures I took, ...)

Lose Track (of time, space, limitation, ...)

Keep Track (of things I wrote down, new words I like, words from people I encountered...).

These parts are not listed in the book. They are instead meshed together and following the sequence of my journey.

The size follows the size of TRAVELER'S notebook, and the binding using multiple elastic strings indicating "tracks", creates the potential to add more book pages, just like our memories work.

Here're some spreads from the book: