How much does a reader’s men­tal im­age of the au­thor in­flu­ence the con­tent of a book? From a se­ries of works on the con­cept of au­thor­ship in con­tem­po­rary art and lit­er­a­ture, Pro­ject for USTED con­sists in the cover de­sign for a col­lec­tion of po­etry (ti­tle: USTED) by Ar­gen­tine poet Lila Zem­b­o­rain. The book’s edi­tion was bro­ken into three print­ings and each of the three groups’ back cov­ers were printed with a dif­fer­ent au­thor’s pho­to­graph, taken at dif­fer­ent points in Zem­b­o­rain’s life. The three pho­tographs could be of dif­fer­ent au­thors, a metaphor for the changes to an artist’s work as they move through the phases of their life.

Ter­ence Gower and Lila Zem­b­o­rain, 1998