Manon: Feathers

Memories and observations from the five-decade career of feminist installation artist Manon

Swiss artist Manon (born 1940) came to prominence in the 1970s with her installation The Salmon coloured boudoir, a meticulously furnished bedroom in a Zurich loft filled with fetish objects, feathers and glittery materials. Her intimate installations and staged photographs explore social transformations around sexuality and gender. This volume of her writings gathers diaristic entries made for a 2005 documentary on her work, “about the passage of time, and about the passage of my times,” as she puts it.

Published here for the first time, Feathers offers a succinct look back on Manon’s life and art, interweaving memories with everyday concerns and observations. In contrast to her elaborate mises-en-scène, what interests the author of these notes is not pageantry and sensationalism, but minute mood swings, poetic observations of her urban and natural surroundings, the trials and tribulations of the heart, and reflections on aging and transience.