Early in 2001 two friends and I made a journey through central Spain to the tiny town of Infante somewhere near Ciudad Real in Castilla-La Mancha. We were traveling in the van of my friend Capi, transporting a sculpture, my “Soup Box” (actually entitled un lugar donde comer sopa) to the family home of my friend Iñaki. On our way there we stopped somewhere to use a phone, and our search for one lead to some wordplay with the word “teléfono.” I turned it “telenofo” and Iñaki into “nofolete.” It was such a nice sounding word that it stuck, and began to have a life of its own. A nofolete is a telephone turned inside out and upside down, cut into morphemes, and shuffled--a metaphor of sorts for the web, growing from the guts of the telecommunications industry, trading text for voice for faster text for cheaper voice for image for touch for being in an upwardly spiraling dialectic. Maybe.
It is also, as I said, a delightful sounding word, and I very soon began to imagine what kind of animal it would be--something like an elephant, but also a rooster. The nofolete began to make appearances in my sketchbooks in that guise, an elephant-headed rooster, a gryphon with a trunk. You can imagine how pleased I was to find a nofolete just a few days ago at Wat Jedyod, right here in Chiang Mai, beautiful and golden. So, my life swallows its own tail, and as my brother boards a plane for Barcelona, I find Spain in Thailand.
