Etwas fehlt
Quite Meta
Over 3,000 photos from 12 years of preparatory work and research by the St. Gallen artist Alex Hanimann are presented in a thick, heavy hardcover volume whose design plays self-confidently with genre conventions. The high-gloss dust jacket in four colours with a portrait of the designer Romy Strasser extending across its back turns out to be a folded poster with large areas of white and grey in the margins. This contrasts with the elegant grey linen binding and the embossed serif font, the blue endpaper, matt paper and the reduced layout of the photos, many in black and white, that are inside. These are presented in a uniform size, between five and nine per page, and without any information, but identifiably grouped by working process or theme. Portrait and landscape formats follow their own grid, but they are randomly combined on the page in a way that often creates unexpected white areas and an uncertain image area. A single line of continuous text in the serif font mentioned above runs across the lower edge of the page, creating random and fascinating associations with the images. This is a performative book that is not afraid to embrace ‘errors’ in design.
