At The Librarian’s Desk: A Conversation with Cristina Napoleone, The Founder of TERRAIN

To step inside concept bookstore TERRAIN is to step through a silver door and onto a deep electric-blue floor. A rough, rock-like finish covers the walls of the store, painted with a wash of cold white paint. Sheets of matte aluminum are cut into blob-like organic shapes—a motif integrated into the shelves on the walls, the benches in the centre of the room and the counter. Atop the bench sits a Monstera plant, propagated into a wide glass vase.

Founded by Geography graduate Cristina Napoleone, the store’s website explains that all of its sales associates are actually experts in an external field. Intrigued, and planning to speak to an ‘expert’ at random, I visit on a random Sunday—not expecting for Cristina herself to be behind the counter. With earnest excitement, she says the timing is perfect: Recently released is her guest podcast on Camille Allen’s I Want Your Job podcast, so the script is rehearsed and ready to go.

To start, Cristina tells me what she told Camille—that her project was fortified over four years of local rejection, then hit a turning point when she was referred to an investor whilst working in Berkeley, California as a UniMelb exchange student. “The guys I was working with were basically like, we've just lined you up with a meeting with our philanthropy partners next week—tell them what you told us... Luckily I had years worth of failed pitches on my computer!”

Cristina says that for this to all happen in her twenties is a miracle, and marvels at how her once-crazy journey now looks like young people entering the Fitzroy store and thanking her for creating the space.

“In that interview with Camille, I said my industry secret is that the right door will always open. And if it doesn’t, you need to kick down the door or create your own. But what I didn’t say, is that you need to then hold that door open for others. Now that TERRAIN’s created the groundwork to get that door open in the space.”

She credits the lineage of mentors she’s had over the years and quotes a Navajo elder in California who advised that before the beginnings of a project, a person should ask themselves: “what kind of ancestor they would like to be?”

“It’s like the orienting of time. How does this shift and what could those ripples be?

The ethos Cristina works around is one of curiosity and immaterial praxis. She recalls feeling that such a space would support her way of thinking, and that she couldn’t be the only person thinking that way.

“We constantly focus on the technological aspect and the material solutions affiliated with sustaining sustainability transitions (the world economy, systems, the way we live), but we don’t talk about immaterial sustainability, which is hard to quantify and otherwise hard to implement. That’s stuff like… human empathy, compassion; our relationship to anything beyond the self.”

“When you diffuse or redefine what the human self is which encompasses all the definitions of nature… that’s actually the work that needs to be done as an undercurrent to enable the longevity of the solutions that we enact on a material level.”

She describes the common occurrence of people entering the store and this philosophy immediately clicking for them.“The reason why it [previously] didn't get there is because the language was around addressing immaterial sustainability; addressing a relationship with the more-than-human world, which is completely intangible.”

It’s this previous lack of understanding in Australia, Cristina reasons, that explains the four years of rejection her Terrain proposal received from “every funding body who you would actually think would be the ones funding this.”

“I tried to hold those rejections and not let them make me want to give up. Because that amount of rejection does make you feel a bit crazy. But to now have undergrad students coming in and confirming that this is supporting their curiosity, rather than it being denied… that’s awesome.”

I ask about the vision Cristina originally had for Terrain, and whether what it’s evolved into now matches up with it. In Four Years of Rejection-Land, what does an expectation even look like? Can the immaterial results of a project be accounted for?

It’s hard to reflect on, she admits. “I still feel like I'm so in it. I haven't had too many pauses since it's been opened to even take the distance or space to take a full gaze outward… In saying that, the way that people hang around here or interact, I think, has... totally blown out my expectations… I knew it would be a social space, but the actual people within Terrain’s orbit are so cool and interesting and curious and openminded, intellectual, sharp, and it's really beautiful. That's something you can only plan so much.”

Cristina explains that the intention of the space was to bring people back into their sensorial bodies through the choice of materials, which encourage sensory curiosity and exploration.

“We’ve taken ourselves so far out of our bodies these days in modern culture. We’ve really separated ourselves, drawn ourselves into screens and forgotten that the world is sensorial. There's many senses that can be engaged, and just by the act of engaging you bring yourself back into the present, which, in a way, is like bringing yourself into a meditative state. And when you're in that kind of state, all kinds of wonderful things can happen. You have great thoughts, you can engage with compassion, you can have space for people, and think with consideration.”

As for the spatial design, Cristina observes that people walk in from the street are drawn into the shop’s strange looking interior design, which puts them immediately in a frame of curiosity. By entering with a state of awe, joy, wonder and curiosity, she explains, visitors are positioned to take on ideas and value-based change, “which is exactly what we need to do, to enable the kind of change that's needed”. Visitors ask questions about the materials, the curation of books and topics, and the “librarian’s desk” is there to provide the answers.

“The act of discovery is really powerful,” she reiterates. “If they've discovered a book themselves, that mindset is a better way to take on information as well. Because you found it, you discovered it. It wasn't prescribed.”

Cristina says that people often pick out a book, and then ask for recommendations, but after receiving these recommendations, they always go back to the first book that they picked up. “Like it's some kind of magical oracle card they found.” She attributes this pattern to the beauty of physical bookshops, “brick and mortar and physical spaces”— because the randomness of that encounter cannot be replicated, even with an algorithm.

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