Manon

The Swiss performance artist Manon asks through her fictitious MISS RIMINI how time, social trends and the cultural consensus shape the individual. One of the first Swiss performance artists, Manon has fashioned a career for herself out of the identities of others. Whether exploring the limits of gender or the beauty of decay, Manon continually foregrounds the instability of place and self. Her project She Was Once MISS RIMINI is one of her most brutal and touching. Here she literally depicts imagined futures for an aging beauty queen. Each exquisite image in this pictorial essay teases out the possible paths Miss Rimini - an alter-ego for Manon who "happened" upon a beauty pageant in the early 1970s and walked away with the crown - could have taken. A small-town diva? A hypersensitive viola player? Perhaps even a psychiatric patient?