Alphabet of Self: Pauline Faieff's Skin Syntax

By @JustinWetch

The photograph that changed everything wasn't meant to. Pauline Faieff was just modeling again, this time in the ocean off Martinique, working on what should have been just another content session. 'I felt like I could be just myself without wearing a mask,' she tells me. The water held no judgment. No algorithm. No audience to please.

When she sees the photographs later, the recognition hits:

"Wow, I've been so hard with myself for so many years. Why?"

This is where everything begins. Not with an answer, but with the right question finally surfacing.

Before the ocean, there were years of shapeshifting. Eight years old, moving from France to Martinique, learning to read rooms and bend herself into whatever shape might fit. "I used to call myself a good chameleon," Pauline says. "I was a good people pleaser."

Literature degree. Business school in Paris. Five years studying what her parents thought mattered. A stint in New York to learn English, then back to purchasing jobs that left her hollow. The familiar trajectory of someone building a life around everyone else's expectations.

Social media became another kind of prison. Thousands of followers meant thousands of judges. She created content instead of art, performed authenticity instead of living it. The depression that followed three years ago wasn't a breakdown, but a breaking open.

"I quit everything. I left my home. I left my boyfriend. I left my family and the job."

Web3 found her right when she needed to be found. "For my entire life, I felt so lonely. No one was really like me or understanding me." But in this community of artists and builders, she discovered something revolutionary: people who wanted her to be herself, not another version of what might sell.

"I found how to stop surviving and finally living my life. I can finally breathe."

The idea arrives in conversation with a friend from the Web3 space. Pauline is explaining how social media platforms censor her photography, how even writing about it can trigger shadowbans. Her friend asks why she doesn't talk about it.

"But even talking about it, you cannot write words about nudity or being naked on social media. You get censored as well."

Then the click: "Wow, why not an alphabet?"

Not an alphabet made with the body, but discovered within it. Letters that were always there, waiting in the curves of shoulders, the bend of elbows, the shadow between ribs. "I wanted something so real, so authentic, something that my body could just speak to me."

She starts taking self-portraits back in Martinique. Hundreds of them. Then she sits with the images, studying them like archaeological fragments. The letters emerge slowly.

"I created my own new language. My body became the data. It's the new way to express yourself deeply and freely."

The work demands discipline. Pauline sets strict parameters for the shoots, constraints that protect the truth of what she's doing.

"No artificial light, no makeup, nothing. Just me being as a human being."

She works in her childhood home in Martinique, where the light comes clean through windows and she feels "both strong and vulnerable." She never tries to create specific letters with her body. That would be performance again, and she's done with performance.

"I didn't want it to be something created. I just took self-portraits and then found the letters on my body."

Some letters hide for weeks. The K refuses to appear. The G plays coy. The Q demands patience. The S curves away from recognition. She keeps shooting, keeps looking, keeps trusting that the alphabet is complete within her, waiting to be read.

Every morning, Pauline wonders if her accounts will still exist. Instagram deleted her once. Twitter vanished her work without warning. She fought to get them back, found people who knew people, begged for restoration of her own creative output.

"You don't want to feel this pressure of social media deciding for you what is good and what is wrong."

The platforms flag her as dangerous. Not for harm or hate, but for skin. For the radical act of showing a body as it actually exists. This is why The Alphabet lives on Bitcoin.

"It was very important for me that it can never be erased, that it's on the blockchain."

Not just for resistance to censorship, though that matters. But for something deeper: ownership, permanence, the promise that this work will outlive the platforms that try to silence it.

The responses split along unexpected lines.

"I noticed something very interesting: men always ask which part of the body it is, while women just feel the pieces."

She says that men want to decode, to map each letter back to its anatomical source, and that women tend to respond to the emotional frequency first, the feeling before the form. Neither reading is wrong, but the difference fascinates her.

She thinks about this often, especially when discussing why women artists struggle for recognition in Web3. "Maybe some men don't really spend time with themselves trying to understand who they are and listening to their bodies. While women are doing the opposite."

The Alphabet is only Phase One.

Phase Two brings collaboration with @harto_fr, a generative artist whose code somehow maintains humanity. "You really feel the texture of his work," Pauline says. "I can feel the humanity through his code." Together, they'll create a system where the twenty-six photographs become data for infinite combinations. People will write their own poems, their own words, using the syntax of Pauline's skin.

Pauline’s dreams for Phase Three go evem further. Immersive installations with mirrors where visitors spend thirty, maybe forty-five minutes finding letters in their own bodies. "Being able to create their own worlds," as Pauline describes it. Not copying her alphabet but discovering their own.

"All around the world. I really wish this project can be shown in different immersive environments."

The girl who called herself a good chameleon now helps others shed their camouflage. The body that once tried to match magazine models now teaches other bodies to read themselves as text.

She imagines showing this work to her younger self, that people-pleasing girl in the trailer between France and Martinique. "She would have been shocked," Pauline laughs. But then: "It will open some part of her that should have been opened earlier."

Some collectors see the work before the market does. @__proper was one of Pauline's first believers. Now he's supporting The Alphabet, coming full circle from faith to fruition. "He made me feel many times that he was never ashamed of nude photography or nude art in general."

@a5ht4r, @maxpretends, and @Giga_Chad_Pepe (yes, that's the username) championed artists like Pauline when platforms wouldn't.

When I ask who inspires her now, Pauline mentions Samantha Cavet’s work that "makes me feel like I'm traveling into a wonderland." Maria Fynsk Norup’s bravery moves her. @vandaloruins AI consciousness experiments probe questions she's always loved about what makes us human.

"I'm here every single day looking at art," she says. "I think it's a mix of many people."

The alphabet continues. Bidding is open until 8/28 on @SignalsArt.

For future episodes of Weekly Dose of Art, @PaulineFaieff recommends I speak with @P1AbyPIA, @mariafynsknorup, and @louisdazy. Pauline was recommended by @samanthacavet.