marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first manifesto of surrealism.

André Breton (1896-1966), regarded as the father of the surrealist movement, published his on 15 October 1924. But the Franco-German poet Yvan Goll (1891-1950) published surrealism's very first manifesto in his own magazine 14 days earlier on 1 October 1924.

Goll's version of Surrealism differed radically from Breton's. Goll referred to Breton’s surrealism, with it reliance on chance, fantasy and dreams, as

Instead of the play of chance (most memorably summed up by the Comte de Lautréamont’s line ) Goll called for a deeper, empirical examination of reality as the foundation on which everything rests.

evokes a suitably surrealist image but it is a million miles from Lautréamont’s throw-of-the-dice on a dissecting table. This is because the juxtaposition of a mussel and a horse is based on the real (not imagined) similarity in shape between a mussel shell and a horse's skull. It is an acute observation not a random association. The one leads quite practically and inexorably to the other. A close attention to the facts of reality, as demanded by Goll, is the source of this particular surrealist image.

The artwork quotes an illustration by Alphonse de Neuville (1835-85) from Jules Verne's Verne's speculative fiction was based on the science of the times, so anticipating Goll's interest in what our current reality can tell us about a heightened sur-reality.

According to Firrell, ' was created especially for Belgium as a love letter to Goll's version of surrealism and what could be more real or more Belgian than a mussel?'