5 THINGS YOU MISSED IN /los-fomos LAST WEEK - With contributions from @m00npapi.eth and @jessyjeanne appreciate you LFers, @kriskris spicy places to go out, @janicka’s drink and @ogebaeby let’s meet on the Maldives Los Fomos weekly playlist link below 🌶️

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Incredible write up of Claude Cahun’s fascinating work!

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what a cute necklace. need :)

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Happy Surrealist Saturday!! Everyone these days seems to be talking about Claude Code these days, and that made me think about another Claude who was just as impactful, Claude Cahun. She's also one of the first to have her work branded with a term we use lightly in Web3: “degenerate.” This is where my exploration took me today Claude Cahun was born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob in 1894 in Nantes, France, into an intellectual Jewish family. Her uncle was Marcel Schwob (a Symbolist writer), and from early on, she was surrounded by people who understood that identity could be written, rewritten, and eventually performed By 1917, she had changed her name for the third and final time to Claude Cahun. Claude being a name that in French could belong to anyone, man or woman, and Cahun taken from her grandmother At 15, she met Suzanne Malherbe, who would become her stepsister when their parents married in 1917, but who was also her lover and collaborator. Suzanne took the name Marcel Moore (illustrator and designer), and together they became something the Surrealist world had never quite seen before. Not sure the world itself had seen something like that before In the 1920s, they moved to Paris and entered the Surrealist orbit. Cahun joined the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists) in 1932, where she met André Breton (founder of Surrealism) and René Crevel (Surrealist writer). Breton called her "one of the most curious spirits of our time” She exhibited at the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition and the Exposition surréaliste d'Objets in Paris. She co-founded Contre-Attaque (Counter-Attack), a radical anti-fascist group, alongside Breton and Georges Bataille (French intellectual and writer). She collaborated with Man Ray (American Surrealist photographer), hosted salons with Sylvia Beach (founder of Shakespeare and Company bookstore), and worked in experimental theatre with Pierre Albert-Birot (director of Le Plateau) But an interesting fact about Cahun is that she never formally joined the Surrealists. she believed that joining would mean surrendering her identity, and identity was the very thing she was fighting to keep free. This act should give us a lot to think about Her self-portraits are extraordinary with Moore behind the camera, and Cahun in front of it transforming herself into weightlifter, dandy, doll, vampire, monk, or soldier Using mirrors, masks, costumes, and other elemens, she asked the question the Surrealists claimed to ask but often didn't: Who are we when we strip away what the world insists we must be? In her 1930 masterpiece Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals), she wrote: "Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me." While male Surrealists painted women as symbols, muses, or erotic fantasies, Cahun photographed herself as nobody. She brought something a refusal to be pinned down, categorized, or made into someone else's dream. This is something I believe Surrealism needed In 1934, she published an essay called Les Paris sont Ouverts (Place Your Bets), where she defended what she called "indirect action" which was the idea that art shouldn't tell you what to think, but should provoke you into thinking for yourself. She had no idea how literal that would become In 1937, sensing the Nazi threat, Cahun and Moore fled to Jersey, a British Channel Island off the coast of Normandy. They thought they'd found safety. But in 1940, Germany occupied Jersey, and suddenly these two queer Jewish artists were living under the regime that had declared their very existence "degenerate” They could have fled again, but of course, they didn't Instead, they they turned their entire artistic practice into a resistance campaign. For four years, they became "Der Soldat Ohne Namen" (The Soldier Without a Name), a phantom German soldier who didn't exist but whose voice appeared everywhere. Cahun would write the messages, Moore would translate them into fluent German, and together they created what they called "paper bullets” These were Dada-esque, surrealist, cryptic, and poetic propaganda, designed to unsettle, and to make German soldiers question everything they'd been told. They wrote in multiple languages (German, French, English, and Polish) to create the illusion of an international resistance They cut up Nazi propaganda posters and turned them into anti-war collages. They wrote fake letters from disillusioned soldiers and tucked them into cigarette boxes, slipped them into coat pockets, left them on car windshields, hid them in church pews. In one church, they hung a banner that read: "Jesus is great, but Hitler is greater because Jesus died for people, but people die for Hitler” They were performing as they’ve always done, except now the stage was an occupied island and the audience was an army In 1944, they were caught. Over 350 of their pieces were used as evidence at their trial. The Nazis refused to believe only two people could have done so much. They were sentenced to death. At the trial, Cahun told the judge he'd have to shoot her twice, once as a Resister, once as a Jew Jersey was liberated in May 1945, just before the executions. They survived, but Cahun never recovered from the year of imprisonment. The Gestapo had destroyed many of her photographs, "the best”, she said, calling them "degenerate art." She died in 1954 at 60 Moore lived until 1972. When she died, by her own hand at 79, she was buried beside Cahun at St Brelade's Church in Jersey, next to the house where they'd lived and resisted together For decades, Cahun's work was almost completely forgotten. It wasn't until the 1990s, when art historian François Leperlier published his biography and introduced her self-portraits to the world, that everything changed Suddenly, her explorations of gender, identity, and selfhood felt prophetic and she became a foundational figure in queer theory, feminist art, and transgender studies She influenced artists like Cindy Sherman (American photographer known for conceptual portraits), Gillian Wearing (British artist who created Me as Cahun Holding a Mask of My Face), Nan Goldin (American photographer documenting LGBTQ+ life), or Francesca Woodman (American photographer) David Bowie created an exhibition of her work in 2007, calling her "a cross-dressing Man Ray with surrealist tendencies." In 2018, Paris named a street after her and Moore. In 2021, Google honored her with an animated Doodle. Her works hang in MoMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston Cahun reminded me of one of my favorite streetwear brands’ ethos, Obey. She didn’t want to change reality solely by what she was creating, but she changed it through what she refused to accept She refused the gender binary, the artistic movement that demanded conformity, fleeing when fascism arrived, and refused to let the Nazis define what was possible Cahun once wrote that she would never finish removing all her masks. I think what she meant was that underneath every identity we perform, there's another question, another possibility, and another self we haven't met yet She spent her whole life asking “Who could I be if no one was telling me who to be?” And then she lived the answer Thank you for reading!!🌹

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Visiting Maison Roche - the fondation corbusier today, a real treat for architecture fans

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Love taking the bus in Paris. An almost free sightseeing tour, and it gets you where you want

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Wuthering Heights costumes. Jaw-dropping

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What a legend we have on fc. For a moment felt like I was reading the book

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https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNRr7m973/

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Love Lily Allen. I’ve literally used all these excuses to make a guy leave me alone in the club https://open.spotify.com/track/1tzREQUvfSvoigbSOU60Bx?si=hAkTkp7NRR6fF3_MXfTZhA

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Don’t contact. It’s Friday ❤️‍🔥

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https://farcaster.xyz/pauline-unik/0xa7ab5344

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https://open.spotify.com/track/1B8C0h5Y8MRvzK7j17BODg?si=gLfa1nV2RoKjuZlxxjUDnQ https://www.instagram.com/p/DTTFIFuCjFW/?igsh=N2Q5bjc1ODQzdm8=

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NEW RELEASE!! Robyn makes me move today https://open.spotify.com/track/6rY4CO2ko4iWpSIm93fWJv?si=2nHY8MRrTwWekJsvix310w

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Adding my Friday tune to the Los Fomos weekly before the wrap up later https://open.spotify.com/track/3kJuiGqiFnDfAX5C79Pb6a?si=xJ7RQ-3CQTKnzVYcp6JvXQ

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