The Lucerne Project

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Interview & article

October 18, 2011

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From "The Columbia Chronicle". Click the image to display it at a more legible size.

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Stolen place names

I went to Maine recently. On my way to the Acadia National park, I passed through a village called Lucerne-in-Maine. I looked it up on the internet when I got back to Chicago, and discovered that it was developed about 100 years ago as a 'planned community', but this idea was shelved when the project ran out of money during the Depression. It was called Lucerne because it is surrounded by wooded mountains and lakes in an area that the locals call 'the Switzerland of America'. Apart from a big resort hotel, there was no real town as such. Lucerne-in-Maine, USA I suppose the surrounding area is reminiscent of Swizterland. But I would bet that the real Lucerne is very different.

Here is the first book for the Lucerne Project. Click on the image above to play a short slideshow. The book consists of eight pages, each 6.5 " high by 11" wide, in an accordion fold that opens out to be 89" wide. The method of making the book was as follows: Trawl the internet for publicly-available photos of Lucerne that people have uploaded to the web. Print out small jpegs. Xerox the jpegs and enlarge by as much as 1000%. Ink and print the xeroxes onto light grey printmaking paper. Write a short phrase suggested by each image. Edit the phrases slightly so that they connect to each other. Print each phrase onto the corresponding print. Glue the pages into one long strip, with the division between each page scored so that they can be folded up accordion-style. Already I can see how this method might be a way of producing a narrative about people I've never met, in a place I've never been, while still retaining a poetic quality to the combination of...

Lucerne in Missouri

I was in St. Louis, Missouri, a few weeks ago, and as I was walking around one of the older neighbourhoods, I saw this doorway: Apparently a lot of people emigrated to St. Louis from Switzerland at the end of the nineteenth century.

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