Jaunt
Lotte Reimann's Jaunt turns a found archive of amateur erotica into a road trip of the artist's own invention, with the car as both setting and object of desire.
The source is a set of nude self-portraits posted to a photo-sharing site by an elderly couple of amateur photographers. Wherever her story had a gap, Reimann added images from other corners of the internet. She then re-photographed everything from a computer screen, so a screen pattern runs through every picture, and treated the results as her own photographs. The book tells her fictional story through the couple's real pictures. Reimann describes the car's pull directly: "Metal, steel, glass, leather, plastic, oil, and dirt," enclosing her as it blasts through the landscape, is "hugely exciting, arousing." Twenty-five colour images run without text across 48 stapled, laminated pages, designed and edited by Jurgen Maelfeyt as APE #052 in an edition of 500. The project was supported by Stiftung Kunstfonds and the Mondriaan Fonds.
Reimann (b. 1982, Germany) studied photography in Bielefeld, took a BFA at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and was a fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Jaunt followed her artist books Guffaw (2013) and Bis morgen im Nassen (RVB Books, 2014). Desire, fetish and the power between author and subject remain her subjects, most fully in the video trilogy Uses of the Erotic (2020–23).
