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: Éve-Claudine Lorétan, alias Coco, Dana What's-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 Alps-images 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 Camélias. Dunia Miralles sees Coco as just such a literary figure of the demi-monde. In her biographically-based novelette, which accompanies Olivier Fatton's photographs, Miralles recounts the sorrows of young Coco.