Coco

A performance artist, avowed transsexual anarchist with no place to call home, macho woman, a fashion model for Marianne Alvoni, a target for the Swiss tabloids: ve-Claudine Lortan, alias Coco, Dana Whats-her-name, Patricia, was so very many people in a life cut way too short. Olivier Fatton met Coco on a Sunday in November 1989. The photographer was mesmerized at first sight by this bright and yet sorrowful angel". Over coffee in a Bern gay bar, they made a deal: Coco would pose for him and Fatton would document her sex reassignment surgery. Their working relationship soon became a love affair, during which Fatton continued putting together his multi-faceted photo essay on colorful Coco, a mosaic of intimate portraits and staged fashion shots, at home and in clubs, on the road, in the Alpsimages haunted by those large melancholy eyes, which Coco once said had become her second mouth. Coco's thousand-page autobiography was stolen by thieves, leaving those eyes to tell the sorrows of a 20th-century Dame aux Camlias. Dunia Miralles sees Coco as just such a literary figure of the demi-monde. In her biographically-based novelette, which accompanies Olivier Fattons photographs, Miralles recounts the sorrows of young Coco.