Inflatable Mondella by Noah Savett
In the early years of his creative rise, when youth filled him with bold confidence, Noah Savett conceived an installation that whispered of the surreal—a transient cathedral of air and thought, known as Inflatable Mondella.
It was the late hours of his short tenure on the campus of Plattsburgh State University, the air there thick with the latent possibilities of untamed genius. The seeds of this creation were not planted in the sterile soil of academia, but in the untamed wilderness of the African plains. There, amidst the Pygmy tribes, Noah discovered a truth cloaked in silence — an uncanny psychic resonance, the kind that could bypass the fumbling clumsiness of words. He communicated without tongue, felt the marrow of unspoken lives, and became intoxicated by the boundlessness of human connection.
Upon returning to the murmur of Western civilization, Noah found himself yearning to amplify this psychic gift, to let it bloom into a force that could envelop others. His search for guidance led him to the enigmatic Nathan Runge, a professor of psychology and philosophy whose reputation shimmered like the hair of a Scandinavian pop star. It was at a gathering of scattered intellects, amidst the clink of wine glasses and the hushed murmurs of hesitant disciples, that Runge looked at Noah and unveiled a revelation.
“You,” Runge said, with the certainty of a prophet, “are a receptacle — a vessel waiting to overflow. But first, you must transcend the mundane traps of survival and the withering isolation of your wilderness years” (referencing Noahs years of living in the deep forests of Schuylerville, NY). “The boundaries you perceive are phantoms of human law, not the fabric of reality.”
Noah, electrified by the professor’s words, realized that the key to his expansion lay in the primal force that mankind both revered and reviled — sexuality. To strip away the veils of shame, to wield the power of desire without apology, was to grasp the pulse of humanity itself. To connect was to seduce, not in carnality alone, but in spirit.
Yet Carnality was not out of the question for Noah, as the base human desire to survive and reproduce were difficult to shed from his conscious self.
This revelation was not enough. Such truths, unmanifested, remain mere whispers in the mind’s corridors. Noah needed a vessel, a form, a tangible representation of this newfound psychic architecture. He envisioned an installation where others could not merely observe, but walk through the labyrinthine networks of his psyche.
Thus, Inflatable Mondella emerged from the fog of thought into the light of creation. A sprawling, translucent beast of thin plastic film, it pulsed like a living organism. Its corridors—endless and serpentine—converged in great conical hubs, each a neuron of Noah’s existential mindscape. To wander its halls was to enter the neural synapses of a man who had dared to transcend himself.
This was no idle sculpture; it was an invitation, a challenge. Participants did not merely traverse Mondella—they were absorbed into it, swept along pathways that mirrored the branching streams of Noah’s thoughts, his doubts, his passions, his truths. Here was the physical embodiment of psychic connection, laid bare for all who dared to enter.
In its essence, Inflatable Mondella was not merely art — it was an act of rebellion against the limitations of flesh and form, an audacious declaration that the mind need not remain confined to the skull. Noah Savett, through his ethereal labyrinth, dared the world to see what he had seen, to feel what he had felt, and to walk, if only briefly, through the tangled neurons of a man who believed that existence itself could be sculpted.
