A REAL ARTIST DISOBEYS. A GOOD COLLECTOR ENCOURAGES IT.
Updated: Sep 7
Pauline Faieff is a perfect example of this disobedience. She began her career on social media, where she found her first collectors and connected with a community of fans around the world. I insist on that word: fans. I grasped the scale of the ‘Pauline Faieff’ phenomenon the day I realised that, whenever I mentioned we were working together, I would meet a group of women whose eyes lit up. Work that resonates and sells well, a large community, fiercely engaged fans… But every good story needs a villain. Pauline works with the nude, and working with nudity on platforms such as Instagram or X means facing censorship again and again. Images deleted, accounts restricted, works deemed ‘inappropriate’ by some opaque algorithmic tribunal. You need to understand that this exposure to censorship has become her everyday reality. Pauline could have changed her style, concealed her body, softened the edges until her work slipped obediently through the filters. In other words, submitted to the puritanism of algorithms. But a real artist disobeys. They do not give up. They find a way around. They always find a way to fit a round peg into a square hole. She could also have denounced this censorship, confronted it openly, spoken out. Except — and this is where it becomes perverse — even the words used to describe it would probably be enough to get her censored again. The trap is perfect. You are forbidden to show, then forbidden to say that you are forbidden.
So what does she do? She invents. She creates her own language. And because she is stubborn — I have got to know her — of course she builds it out of precisely what she was told not to show: nudity. That is the Alphabet. Twenty-six photographs, twenty-six letters, each formed by the curves, folds and hollows of her own body. An entire alphabet, unreadable to machines, that only humans can decipher. Where the algorithm sees something to delete, we read a letter. And with letters, we can write anything. But to reduce the Alphabet to a clever way of outwitting censorship would be to miss the point. Because the real subject is not the algorithm. The real subject is what happens in front of the work. Ultimately, that is what fascinates me most: watching someone approach an image, realise first that they are looking at skin, then at a letter, and finally that they might be looking at a part of their own body. A fold they recognise. A hollow they have learned to hate. In a world that insists a body is something to hide, to filter, to crop, choosing to hang one of these images in your home — a body that machines tried to erase — is taking a stand. It is saying, in your own small way, no. It is rebelling against a puritanism that refuses to name itself and hides behind ‘community guidelines’. You do not become a collector of this work in the same way you hang a pretty print above the sofa. You become one because, somewhere inside, you want to disobey too.
This language first came to life online. Today, it is leaving the screen. Pre-sales of the physical collection opened this morning, ahead of its very first physical exhibition, in Rome, from 7 to 12 July. You can now discover each work, read its poem, and, should one of them speak to you, become its guardian. Because we are not looking for buyers. We are looking for guardians. People willing to carry a letter of this language and take it a little further into the world. And this is only the beginning. In a few months, I am going to ask complete strangers to undress. Not in front of a camera, not in front of me, not in front of anyone else, but in front of themselves. At the centre of the immersive pop-up will be an installation that you will have to enter alone and undress in, facing mirrors, with nobody to please. As I describe this piece, I watch faces change in real time, and see just how much the way we inhabit our bodies differs. I am going to generalise, and there will be a thousand exceptions, but the pattern repeats itself too often for me to ignore it. Men often approach the idea with a certain lightness: why not, after all? It is a game, a curiosity, because, deep down, they have rarely been asked to examine themselves. Yet as the idea starts to become real, you can sense that they feel intimidated too. Women, by contrast, are more likely to freeze. Because they know exactly what that confrontation feels like. They have been practising it since adolescence, under the gaze of a society that keeps telling them what to correct. And their first reaction, very often, is: ‘I could never do that.’ Which is precisely, I believe, why they should. Because what is frightening about that booth is not nudity. It is the idea of finally looking at yourself with nobody to please. How many of us are still able to stand naked before our own reflection, without a filter, without a flattering angle, without that little voice correcting and judging? the Alphabet is not an experience. It is an act of courage and self-love.
Pre-sales of the Alphabet collection: right here
From €450
PS: Know someone this language might move? Send them these words. A language only survives if we pass it on. And, as always, your responses feed my thinking, so please do write back.
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