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Distributed for Scheidegger & Spiess

She Was Once MISS RIMINI

With an Introduction by Brigitte Ulmer
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—through her personas, installations, and performance pieces—continually foregrounds the instability of place and self. Her most recent 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? 

She Was Once MISS RIMINI is a trenchant meditation on the art, or artifice, of growing older. Costume, lipstick, lighting, attitude—all aspects of self-presentation are in concert here with quiet critiques of social and economic systems that limit the options of older women. Accompanied by an enlightening introduction by art theorist Brigitte Ulmer, She Was Once MISS RIMINI is the first and only documentation of Miss Rimini and one of the first books in English on Manon.

Distribution by the University of Chicago Press only to customers in North and South America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Customers elsewhere should visit the website of Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess.


128 pages | 57 color plates | 6 x 8 | © 2005

Art: European Art, Photography


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Table of Contents

Rimini, one summer in the Seventies.
A young woman, a beauty contest at a beachfront hotel.
The scent of happiness and a little glamour,
as she is crowned Miss Rimini.
Who is she now?
The artist takes on the persona of her fictional creation
over fifty times.

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