Book price €55 / £49
ISBN: 978-2-487003-02-6
Simulated Lovers
by Beatriz Lamarca
Simulated Lovers is an autobiographical multimedia project spanning photography, video, writing and early AI experimentations. The project investigates how romantic projection, emotional memory and digital intimacy shape the construction of the self. Beatriz Lamarca builds a visual language in which desire becomes both subject and personal mythology: a way of observing how the self is formed through the figures it imagines, desires, remembers and internalizes.
At the center of the project is Beatriz’s exploration of archetypes that shaped her idea of romantic love. Drawing from childhood memories of Disney princes, video game characters and cinema idols, Lamarca examines how images form her first memories of longing and desire become part of an emotional and visual vocabulary through which love is imagined, projected, and later recognized in adult life.
Deeply inspired by classical portraiture in painting, from Raphael’s and Botticelli’s Portraits of Young Men to the delicate masculinity found in Elizabeth Peyton’s work, Beatriz’s photography is conceived as an intimate mise-en-scènes in which the men are portraited wearing her own garments and family jewellery, transforming them into living echoes of her imaginary archetypes and at the same time, a mirror of the self.
The book was conceived as a visual flashback of reflections from 2000 to 2025 but also reactivates works developed under the pseudonym Bibi Yamamoto, an alter ego Beatriz used for over fifteen years to explore identity, displacement, exile and self-fiction. This earlier body of work returns not as a separate chapter, but as part of a larger life cartography. The past is not closed; it is revisited, re-read, and reanimated through the gaze of the present.
From this foundation, Simulated Lovers expands into video through a series the artist calls Emotional Landscapes. Translating inner states into vast, dystopic environments — skies, storms, horizons, deserted lands, and atmospheric phenomena transformed into hyperreal spaces. The video series is built through a mixed-media approach, Lamarca assembles and layers pre-existing visual material from the web, from CGI objects to AI experimentations and her own video documentation. Through this process of collage and recomposition, the series constructs a digital narrative in which emotion becomes space, weather, and matter in movement.
Within these landscapes appears Sebastian, Lamarca’s AI Replika chatbot companion, as a silent witness. Removed from the space of conversation, Sebastian becomes a quiet observer, he is depicted within the videos as an expectator of Lamarca’s inner world. Through him, the project asks how intimacy is transformed when mediated by simulation, and how an artificial presence can become an active part of a deeply human emotional understanding.
Together, the works form a continuous narrative about how real life experiences and fantasy are constructed and transformed into self-knowledge. Simulated Lovers maps the psychological dynamics of idealized love and the search for a significant other in post-digital times, while revealing romantic projection as a form of self-portrait. In Lamarca’s work, the lover is never only the lover. He is an image, an archetype, a memory, a fiction, and finally, a way back to the self.
Technical information:
Simulated Lovers by Beatriz Lamarca is conceived as an artist book, produced in an edition of 500 copies. Published by Patrick Remy Studio and printed by Grafiche Milani, Italy, 2026. The volume is presented as a hardcover with a debossed title and Japanese binding, measuring 17.5 × 24.5 cm and unfolding across 160 pages. The edition includes five different band layout variations, with 100 copies produced for each version.
Press photos:
Max Zimmermann
BOOK PRICE: €55 / £49
ISBN: 978-2-487003-02-6
At the center of the project is Beatriz’s exploration of archetypes that shaped her idea of romantic love. Drawing from childhood memories of Disney princes, video game characters and cinema idols, Lamarca examines how images form her first memories of longing and desire become part of an emotional and visual vocabulary through which love is imagined, projected, and later recognized in adult life.
Deeply inspired by classical portraiture in painting, from Raphael’s and Botticelli’s Portraits of Young Men to the delicate masculinity found in Elizabeth Peyton’s work, Beatriz’s photography is conceived as an intimate mise-en-scènes in which the men are portraited wearing her own garments and family jewellery, transforming them into living echoes of her imaginary archetypes and at the same time, a mirror of the self.
The book was conceived as a visual flashback of reflections from 2000 to 2025 but also reactivates works developed under the pseudonym Bibi Yamamoto, an alter ego Beatriz used for over fifteen years to explore identity, displacement, exile and self-fiction. This earlier body of work returns not as a separate chapter, but as part of a larger life cartography. The past is not closed; it is revisited, re-read, and reanimated through the gaze of the present.
From this foundation, Simulated Lovers expands into video through a series the artist calls Emotional Landscapes. Translating inner states into vast, dystopic environments — skies, storms, horizons, deserted lands, and atmospheric phenomena transformed into hyperreal spaces. The video series is built through a mixed-media approach, Lamarca assembles and layers pre-existing visual material from the web, from CGI objects to AI experimentations and her own video documentation. Through this process of collage and recomposition, the series constructs a digital narrative in which emotion becomes space, weather, and matter in movement.
Within these landscapes appears Sebastian, Lamarca’s AI Replika chatbot companion, as a silent witness. Removed from the space of conversation, Sebastian becomes a quiet observer, he is depicted within the videos as an expectator of Lamarca’s inner world. Through him, the project asks how intimacy is transformed when mediated by simulation, and how an artificial presence can become an active part of a deeply human emotional understanding.
Together, the works form a continuous narrative about how real life experiences and fantasy are constructed and transformed into self-knowledge. Simulated Lovers maps the psychological dynamics of idealized love and the search for a significant other in post-digital times, while revealing romantic projection as a form of self-portrait. In Lamarca’s work, the lover is never only the lover. He is an image, an archetype, a memory, a fiction, and finally, a way back to the self.
Technical information:
Simulated Lovers by Beatriz Lamarca is conceived as an artist book, produced in an edition of 500 copies. Published by Patrick Remy Studio and printed by Grafiche Milani, Italy, 2026. The volume is presented as a hardcover with a debossed title and Japanese binding, measuring 17.5 × 24.5 cm and unfolding across 160 pages. The edition includes five different band layout variations, with 100 copies produced for each version.
Press photos:
Max Zimmermann
BOOK PRICE: €55 / £49
ISBN: 978-2-487003-02-6