Claire Fontaine ‘lent’ the title to the Biennale Arte 2024, “Foreigners Everywhere”, taken from a series of neon works created and re-proposed in different declinations. The current situation of political, managerial, social emptiness is the one in which this collective wanders, with her lucid and tragic analysis: of every current emergency (from the climatic to the geopolitical, from labour to political representation) we know everything about the premises, but we do not know how to solve it.

Times are ripe to evaluate the extent of the damage caused by capitalist individualism and to see how weak the subjectivities built upon this paradigm have become

These two words, Foreigners Everywhere, bring together a whole world. From 2004 to today Claire Fontaine has kept giving them new and profound meanings, according to the contexts in which they were “pronounced”. Where did the work start from and where has it arrived? And what physical and metaphysical ‘boundary’ defines it today as a manifesto for the Biennale?
Stranieri Ovunque (Foreigners Everywhere) is the enigmatic signature of a flyer addressed to migrants found by us in Turin at the beginning of the years 2000s. We have collected the potential of these two ambiguous words, we have translated them into different languages and illuminated them as if they were subtitles of the space in which they were installed. We started this series of works twenty years ago. Stranieri Ovunque in old Tupi language has already been the title of an exhibition curated by Adriano Pedrosa in 2009, but being chosen as the title of the Biennale radically transforms it. By appropriating an appropriation, the curator has changed its function, as it happens with an object when it becomes a readymade, except that here it is a work of art that shelters all the others, like refugees. This Biennale was conceived from the standpoint of the Global South at a time when the number of refugees worldwide is the highest ever registered and several terrifying conflicts are staining the present with blood beyond repair. We hope it will bring tools to emotionally and critically address these tragedies.

Both in the symbolic construction of Claire Fontaine and in her works, there seems to be a clear intention to overcome subjectivity as a historical blackmail of authorship, of the cult of the artist. Is it really so?
Times are ripe to evaluate the extent of the damage caused by capitalist individualism and to see how weak the subjectivities built upon this paradigm have become, because it doesn’t put human relationships at the center of the construction of people’s sense of self. Physical and experienced intersubjectivity is the main source of meaning for our lives and ultimately the condition for creativity. It is nice to talk about blackmail to address today’s conception of subjectivity, because in fact the program of identity in general is to always remain the same, in order to meet the expectations of those who shape it (family, work, society, state) while subjectivity is instead in the becoming. Our lives are non-linear processes, continuous movements in unpredictable directions, not forced stages marches within a productive path.

It seems that for Claire Fontaine art has nothing to do with fear, desperation, nor with the artist’s need to relate to social bodies. In fact, she gives the feeling of not being uncomfortable in an empty room…
No, not at all. We spend our lives in empty rooms, like most artists. Loneliness is not something to fear, it is essential to creativity and mental balance. It is also the condition for appreciating the community.

From the readings of her interviews as well as from the viewing of her works Claire Fontaine seems to possess an intellectual rigor worthy of a mathematical logician and a vision of time horizons worthy of a skilled financial analyst. However, her analyses of society and art never border on cynicism nor opportunism: not only are they plausible, but they also seem to have a collective awareness, a painful wisdom regarding the risks of the upcoming future. How does Claire Fontaine keep up with her time and how does this affect her work?
Is this a tricky question? It seems too flattering… Artists have the immense luck of not being chained to any social class, they meet rich, poor, ignorant, cultured, interesting, boring people, if they wish they can keep their minds completely open and try to understand their present with as little prejudice as possible, they can, in short, cultivate freedom. Of course, by doing so they put themselves in an exhausting position that creates countless complications and most people prefer to avoid them. For us, as we say that our work is an investigation upon the experience of being alive in the twenty-first century, within Claire Fontaine we have no choice and we must keep both our hearts and minds open, but we could all try to do it.

We started with gender identity because patriarchal society is structured upon fixed roles: male identity oscillates between honor and shame and the woman who orbits around it is co-responsible for the side towards which the needle leans in the existence of the man that she accompanies, this is one of the first mechanisms to destroy…

An important concept in her aesthetic and creative system is that of the human strike. What should the man strike from?
To begin with, we should strike against gender identities: “man” for example is an abstract and oppressive idea for humankind and must be revisited in light of the toxicity of patriarchy. Our current awareness of the relationship between production and reproduction shows that the re-appropriation of the means of production by the working class would no longer solve anything; our production methods are not sustainable and are plunging us deeper and deeper into ecological disaster. It is our relationships with the world, with the resources of our energy, with work, it is our desires that will need to be radically transformed. The battlefield of these struggles is no longer just class difference, but subjectivity and the way in which it is constructed, the strike can no longer be limited to the professional field, it must involve the relational space, in which our complicity with the oppressors is more difficult to unhinge. Relational work has become a real mine both in professional and social fields, we constantly contribute to the reproduction of an unlivable society in many different ways (with free or poorly paid care work, with the acceptance of conditions of psychologically and materially inhuman survival, with the fear of reporting the horror that surrounds us). Dissociating ourselves from what in our relationships, even informal ones, makes oppression and loneliness, anguish and depression possible, allows us to go on human strike and find companions in the struggle. We started with gender identity because patriarchal society is structured upon fixed roles: male identity oscillates between honor and shame and the woman who orbits around it is co-responsible for the side towards which the needle leans in the existence of the man that she accompanies, this is one of the first mechanisms to destroy: if it breaks, everything else will break– as Paul Preciado says.

Adriano Pedrosa offers a new vision of the South as a concept and perspective. Why did Claire Fontaine choose the South?
We can give you the obvious answers that are naturally true (about food, people, weather). Truly we chose Palermo for its relationship with resilience, because it lives with its wounds and finds ways to coexist with the irreparable, the imperfection, the neglect. All the problems of our civilization can be seen much more clearly from the South. The problem of capitalism is that it comes with a form of rewriting of reality, the advertising propaganda that is embodied (Debord called it the society of the spectacle) that makes invisible all the possibilities and opportunities that could save us from the present disaster. From the South, however, they are clearly visible.

Featured image: © Fausto Brigantino, Palermo 2024