The installation invites adults to rediscover how reading operates before it becomes silent and automatic.

Big Bad Wolf

with a Toothache: An Immersive Book-Object Exhibition

Logline


A walk-in picture book in which children enter the wolf’s mouth and become active characters, experiencing how a physical book creates time, suspense, and comedy through pacing and the logic of the page turn.

Curtorial Thesis

A picture book is not only a story. It is a physical reading machine that manufactures time.

This installation expands the codex into architecture. The page turn becomes a spatial cut. Negative space becomes a pause. Repetition turns into corridor rhythm. Delay—the toothache—emerges as an embodied narrative engine.

Children do not merely observe the wolf. They inhabit the book’s pacing and perform the story with their own bodies.

Visitor Experience (Flow)

  • Cover / Threshold
    A large-scale “book cover” entrance introduces the story world and establishes the exhibition as a spatial reading experience.

  • The Mouth
    Children pass through a soft, sculptural wolf’s mouth. Teeth function as seats, frames, or portals, playful, non-threatening, and scaled to the child’s body.

  • Page-Turn Corridor
    Oversized spreads become architectural walls. Movement through the corridor recreates the rhythm and timing of page turns, translating sequential reading into bodily motion.

  • Toothache Pause
    A calm “waiting” pocket where the narrative slows down. Sound and visual cues reinforce delay, anticipation, and comic frustration, activating the toothache as a temporal device.

  • Role of the Reader
    Children choose how to engage. Through simple interactive stations, they may become the dentist, the narrator, or the wolf’s “inner voice,” using touch, sound, stamps, or guided prompts.

  • Exit
    Children leave as co-authors, carrying a small takeaway prompt that invites them to re-enter the book through their own reading.

Key Components

  • Large-scale spread walls (reproduction prints, modular panels)

  • Sculptural mouth portal (soft materials, rounded forms, museum-safe finishes)

  • Optional soundscape: breath, chewing, tooth-throb rhythms, page-turn cues

  • Optional interactive stations: dentist kit role-play, howl button, pacing dial, stamped trail marking the child’s path through the story

  • Display of original artworks and process materials (sketches, dummy, layout studies), connecting the installation to picture-book art practice

Why It Fits the Carle

The installation approaches picture-book art as an experiential form, in which material design and narrative structure operate as a single system. By translating page-turning, pacing, and visual rhythm into spatial experience, the project aligns closely with the museum’s mission to collect, preserve, and present picture-book art while engaging audiences across generations.

Accessibility and Safety (Commitments)

  • Non-threatening design language, clear sightlines, and gentle spatial transitions

  • ADA-considerate circulation options, with both seated and standing interaction points

  • Easy-clean surfaces, modular construction, and interaction design intended for supervised environments

Deliverables Ready

  • Two-page overview PDF including floor plan and key visuals

  • Image deck of 10–12 visuals (book, selected spreads, material features, mockups)

  • Checklist of works (originals and reproductions) with dimensions and media

Credits

Concept and artwork by Daniel Kondo
Based on the picture book Lobo Mau com Dor de Dente

High-resolution images

  • Cover

  • Selected spreads

  • Book-as-object photographs

Reading material

FULL PDF

  • Full reading PDF

  • Excerpts available on request

About the author

Daniel Kondo is a Brazilian author, illustrator, and designer working at the intersection of picture-book art, graphic design, and visual narrative. His work examines how material structure, pacing, and humor shape reading as a bodily and temporal experience.

His books have received major literary and design awards and have been presented in exhibitions and institutional contexts in Brazil and abroad. Kondo’s practice treats the picture book as an experiential system, extending its formal logic beyond the page into space, performance, and participation.

His work is grounded in the tradition of picture-book art as a form of visual thinking.

Links

For editors

Additional images, captions, or a physical copy can be provided upon request. The project is available for coverage in design, books, and culture sections.