frances cannon

Thought this could fit in well here

Ok I don’t mean to be doing this too often but I literally just wrote a paper about this so I thought I would comment! The English translation is The Cursed Woman but the original French is La Femme Damnée. “Femmes Damnées” was the title of a Baudelaire poem from his acclaimed 1857 book Fleurs du mal, which was known, among other things, to be a collection that famously dealt with the subject of lesbians. The poem tells the story of the desires and passionate love between two lesbians: Delphine and Hippolyte. As a result of this poem and of the book as a whole, the terms “fleurs du mal” and “femme damnée” became lesbian monikers of the turn of the century. Though some have deemed the term “damned women” to be accusatory of some moral dissonance, the poem it is derived from is actually quite sympathetic to the condition of lesbian love as it is a love which is unable to fully flourish in that time. Regardless, the translated title of Tassaert’s painting is misleading, as the original French is less accusatory and more identifying. The title is more accurately “the lesbian.”

And she’s doing fine

David Ferrando Giraut: The series Natural Scenes.

“The series Natural Scenes deals with a contemporary perception of the landscape, deeply influenced by mass media but linked in some way to the tragic spirit of the romantic vision of nature.

By playing popular horror movies in real, familiar landscapes I deal with the way in which mass media images come to be a part of our own personal memories, influencing the perception of our environments. Within this tension there is an interplay between tragic – and fictional – events such that, even though they are not an actual part of the history of these landscapes, they nevertheless appear implicit in them.

I believe this coalescence is engendered through the combination of ancestral fears and cultural references.”

David Ferrando Girault, Natural Scenes, 2006.