Claire Fontaine


Claire Fontaine is a feminist conceptual art persona created in Paris in 2004 by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, an Italian-British artist duo who declared themselves her "assistants". Since 2018 Claire Fontaine lives and works in Palermo and has a studio in the historical centre of the Kalsa near Piazza Magione.
After lifting her name from a popular brand of French school notebooks and stationery, Claire Fontaine declared herself a readymade artist and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people's work. Claire Fontaine translated into English means "Clear Fountain" and can also be conceptually linked to the artwork Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, known as the most famous readymade.

Work

Claire Fontaine uses the concept of the readymade as a way of criticising "production" disguised as a creation of more and more artefacts that are desirable because they superficially appear as new. Generally she works with appropriation on a formal level and she hijacks contents, using sculpture, installation, video and painting to create an emotionally loaded criticism of the author and the forms of authority at this stage of capitalism. This aesthetic approach that she describes as "expropriation", a way of giving an existential use value to pre-existing objects and artworks, also addresses the general crisis of singularity, which she describes as the individual and collective impossibility to give a meaning to one's life under the current political circumstance and the systematic surveillance, repression and countless limitations of our freedom. Claire Fontaine prefers to integrate the existing art circuit to create complicities and foster change which entails partaking in the mechanisms and subjects of the art industry including collectors, dealers and institutions.
In an Interview with Circa Art Magazine in 2008 she states: "I think forming gangs, mafias, collectives, networks, bands of people is a way to survive in the hostile capitalist system and then eventually a way to become a pressure group, in order to transform these particular conditions."
Writing and text based pieces play an important role in Claire Fontaine's work. She distributes texts in her exhibitions and she uses different registers in her writing such as poetry, critical theory, essays and manifestos. The artist criticises the hierarchy between visual and verbal expression.
In February 2020 she was invited by Maria Grazia Chiuri to create the mise-en-scène for Dior's Autumn/Winter 2020 collection for Paris Fashion Week which took place in the Les Tuileries. The artist used the catwalk to perform an operation of Institutional Critique investing the floor and the ceiling; she presented Newsfloor and several large suspended LED signs stating for example: Patriarchy Kills Love, When women strike the world stops, Feminine beauty is a ready-made or Patriarchy = Climate emergency.
Claire Fontaine's work, "Foreigners Everywhere" was chosen as the official title for the 2024 Venice Biennale, where a series of her neon sign sculptures of the words "foreigners everywhere" was also displayed in multiple languages at the Biennale for the first time under the arches of the Arsenale, looking out to the Grand Canal.

Monographs

Books

Human Strike and the Art of Creating Freedom, Hal Foster, Semiotext(e), Dec. 2020
  • Lo sciopero umano e l'arte di creare la libertà, Ilaria Bussoni DeriveApprodi, 2017, La Grève humaine: et l'art de créer la liberté, Diaphanes, 2020
  • The Human Strike Has Already Begun & Other Essays, Mute, 2013. Print ; eBook
  • Notas sobre économia libidinal, MUSAC, 2011, edited by Maria Ines Rodriguez
  • Some Instructions for the Sharing of Private Property, One Star Press, 2011
  • Vivre, Vaincre, Editions Dilecta, 2009

Writings

  • Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism', Vers une théorie du matérialisme magique, Diaphanes, Issue 8/9 Winter 2019/20
  • Making Life possible in Jens Hoffmann, In the Meantime. Speculations on Art, Curating, and Exhibitions, Sternberg Press, 2020,
  • The Visitor as a Commercial Partner: Notes on the 58th Venice Biennale, E-flux Journal No. 102 – September 2019
  • L'anno in cui la paura andò in sciopero in È solo l'inizio. Rifiuto, affetti, creatività nel lungo '68', edited by I. Bussoni, N. Martino, Ombre Corte, 2018,
  • If our Lives are Black. On Angela Davis and Gina Dent's conference at La Maison de l'Amérique Latine, Paris, May Quarterly Journal, #.17, 14 March 2017
  • Boredom, edited by Tom McDonough, Documents of Contemporary Art, 2017,
  • 1977. L'anno dello sciopero umano, Cultura, Il manifesto, 05.04.2017
  • Our Common Critical Condition, E-flux Journal No. 73 – 05. 2016
  • Weed and the Practice of Freedom, May Quarterly Journal, #.16, 2016
  • Towards a Canonic Freedom, Texte zur Kunst, Issue 100, 2015
  • We Are All Clitoridian Women: Notes on Carla Lonzi's Legacy, E-flux Journal No. 47 – September 2013
  • Krebber in Bordeaux, Texte zur Kunst Issue 89, 2013
  • Invisible Curators, Texte zur Kunst, Issue 86, 2012
  • Draft for aesthetic subjects anaesthetic object, Flashart, January–February 2010
  • Entrée en matière, May Quarterly Journal, #.4. 06. 2010Toward an Imageless Political Education, Diacritics, a review of contemporary criticism, Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol. 39 no.23,, Fall 2009
  • The Emancipated Reader, May Quarterly Journal, #.1 06. 2009
  • Human strike within the field of libidinal economy, Descent to Revolution, edited by James Voorhies, pp. 144–151, Bureau for Open Culture, 2009
  • Preface to Coco Fusco, Petit manuel de torture à l'usage des femmes-soldats, Les Prairies Ordinaires, Paris

Interviews

  • L'immanenza del linguaggio: un dialogo con Claire Fontaine, Anita Chari, Simone Ciglia, Flashart Italia, June 2020
  • L'arte di essere libere', Interview with Eva Morletto, Grazia, no. 23 21.05.2020
  • Claire Fontaine Collective Capital, Interview with Evrim Oralkan, Collecteurs, March 2020
  • Pretend to be dead, An Interview with Claire Fontaine, Kyra Kordoski, White Fungus, 2015
  • Giving Shape to Painful Things, Interview Andrew Culp and Ricky Crano, Radical Philosophy, RP175
  • Claire Fontaine. ''La nostra Italia bruciata che non-cambia mai, Laura Larcan, La Repubblica, 3/2/2012
  • Grève humaine, a conversation between Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey, May Quarterly Journal, No. 4 March 2010
  • In Life There is No Purity, Only Struggle, Interview with Bart van der Heide, Metropolis M magazine
  • Acts of Freedom, Interview with Niels Van Tomme, Arts and Papers 33.06
  • The Glue and the Wedge: The Cases of Claire Fontaine and Canell and Watkins', Isobel Harbison and Ilaria Gianni No. 124, Circa Art Magazine 2008
  • Macht Arbeit, Interview with Stephanie Kleefeld Texte zur Kunst, Issue 73, 2009
  • Claire Fontaine by Anthony Huberman'', Bomb Magazine No. 105, 10.2008

Solo exhibitions