Cow Princess & The Spacetime Where We Re-Evaluate Our Feelings is a photobook and a story book, not a visual novel. The parallel narratives intertwine at points but otherwise tell their own stories. The design of the book mirrors that, with the body text used as a conscious footnote.
This book was two years in the making and will never be sold for profit. It travels, from person to person, like a tourist.
The project is a collaboration par excellence. On the first level, it is the brainchild of photographer Casper Fitzhue and illustrator Alexander Voutchkov, from a story written by the first. Secondly, the interspersed textual narrative grew together with the models, actors and dancers photographed, whose stories were added to the main narrative. In a literal sense, the book grew with the effort of everyone involved. Thirdly, a lot of the images were produced during an event-performance organised in Antwerp together with a close team formed of Alex Voutchkov, Nils Missorten, Jonathan Franz, Alexey Shlyk, Keith D’Haese & Veronica Podkolzina. It was then that around 40 local creatives (stylists, makeup artists, light technicians, dancers) came together to realise a vision, a sort of movie never to be seen, as a mass collaboration.
Regarding the story, CowP belongs to a genre that the author calls ‘real-life sci-fi’. Blending stories collected on the Internet about potential futures with personal fragments from the life of the photographer or his work partner together with real stories belonging to some of the models involved. Photographically, the book features two types of images. The portraits and group shots feature transformative, fluid identities, beings in the process of changing, of becoming. Moments just-before. Shot in all the colours of the spectrum using only complex lighting arrangement. The abstract images can be seen as local attempts of looking at other, bigger, things or diagrams for potential other dimensions.
Together, they open up a conversation about our place in the world of today.