Reading, Talk Show & Movie Tunes

This event was organized by TheArtists celebrating the publication of the Cahiers d'Artistes 2023, designed and published by Jungle Books. It was part of a series of eight individual formats – including screenings, performances, talks and readings – with each artist who realized an artist book with the support of Pro Helvetia in 2023: Patricia Bucher, Martin Chramosta, Maria Guta, Thomas Julier, David Knuckey, Rhona Mühlebach, Gabriel Stöckli and Eva Zornio. The programme took place between October and December 2023 at various locations in Switzerland. For those interested, they offered the opportunity to obtain a copy of the small edition Cahiers.

Loneliness Beside The Swimming Pool, 232 x 300 mm, 176 pages (published by Jungle Books)

Lola Lane, Maria Guta’s alter ego, has appeared in a variety of roles in the past few years. Previously, these transformations took place primarily on social media or in video and performance projects. For her Cahier, entitled “Loneliness Beside The Swimming Pool”, the artist tried to reassemble her old collection of cinema magazines and books, from which she scanned a large number of pictures. She then digitally manipulated the scanned images by replacing all the existing faces with her own, and finally reprinted everything in order to create a series of analog collages.

Within this compulsive collection of images, spread across 180 pages and resembling a fan-book, Lola Lane morphs into a significant number of celebrities and fictional characters spanning the past 100 years. The publication is also an artistic homage to the little-known actress Lola Lane and the pop culture that fuelled Guta’s imagination since her early childhood.

Geneva-based artist and writer Fabienne Radi wrote the text for Maria Guta's Cahier. In perfect harmony with the visual collages, she skilfully crafted a cut-up of texts that take us on a whirlwind tour of Lola Lane's multiple lives. It's like a compressed showcase of stars and "it girls" spanning the 1920s to 2020, from Joan Crawford to Britney Spears, with detours through the lives of Frances Farmer, Pamela Des Barres, Anna-Nicole Smith, and other intriguing characters who've experienced their fair share of decadence, tragedy, and roller-coaster journeys.