Elisabeth - I want to eat (ONLY 150 COPIES - WITH A PRINT)

Mariken Wessels
Elisabeth - I want to eat (ONLY 150 COPIES - WITH A PRINT)

Photographs: Mariken Wessels

Publisher: Self published

80 pages

Year: 2009

Price: 300 €

Comments: Softcover, 330 x 240 mm. Edition, 2009. Edition limited to 150 numbered copies. With a print (giclé print)(1/5). In very good condition.

Elisabeth - I want to eat - consists of a collection of anonymous photographs, letters and postcards belonging to a young woman, which the artist stumbled upon in a shop in the Hendrik Jacobszstraat in Amsterdam. The found material was appropriated by photographing the images, creatively processing and arranging them, as well as occasionally adding other material.

The photographs depict a young woman defiantly posing in front of the camera, both figuratively and literally exposing herself. The black and white photographs are worn out, frayed by numerous scratches and dust particles, blending together both the exaltation and melancholy recorded in them.

Apart from the photographs, the book carries a series of printed postcards and letters addressed to Elisabeth, from which the reader gradually infers that her life was thrown off track in some way. ‘Religion, order, discipline, detachment from the quest for ambition’ – these are, in brief, the ingredients of advice with which a family member proposes to ‘heal’ her. Yet the person giving her advice himself tells no straightforward story. One is in fact left wondering which of the two people is more bizarre.