Anonima, LA
ARTIST
Monica Forte
ON VIEW
August 23, 2025
SUMMARY
Known Studio is excited to bring back Anonima, a traveling photography project that explores “non-places” through collective image-making. Conceived in Milan in 2024 with a focus on the city’s anonymous bar culture, the project came to Los Angeles in January 2025 with its first U.S. exhibition at Known Studio. For its return, Anonima turns its attention to one of LA’s most iconic “non-places”: the motel.
Motels occupy a particular place in Los Angeles’s landscape—ubiquitous yet overlooked, familiar yet mysterious. They carry layers of association, from Americana road trips and cinematic backdrops to the realities of transient living, illicit encounters, and anonymity in the city. This new chapter of Anonima invites Angelenos to reframe these spaces through photography, capturing fragments of LA’s urban fabric that are at once ordinary and saturated with cultural meaning.
By bringing together collective submissions and the perspective of artist Monica Forte, Anonima examines how motels function as sites of impermanence and imagination, revealing the hidden narratives embedded in their neon-lit facades.
ARTIST BIO
Monica Forte is an emerging artist with a background in interior architecture, developed through her studies in Venice and Milan. Her experience as an architect deeply influences her artistic vision, shaping the way she creates space and atmosphere in her work. Photography plays a central role in her creative process and has become one of her main tools of expression.
Based in Milan, Forte continues to work as an interior architect while also developing her artistic research. Her recent projects explore participatory art and aim to create immersive experiences that actively engage the viewer.
