John Kelsey: Claire Fontaine's practice seems to revolve around the word « foreigner »... could you say something about this concept, if indeed it is one, and how it informs (infects) your activities and tactics? Claire Fontaine: The series of neon signs Foreigners Everywhere in several different languages, for example, is named after an anarchist collective from Turin that fights racism through its different activities. The ambivalence in their name made me wonder what might happen if it was physically and materially displaced into different sites and contexts. It's clear now that immigration and emigration are not simple epiphenomena linked to the economy. They are existential and perceptual experiences in their own right. As for the strangeness that we can all feel when faced with a world that is entirely fabricated and governed by senseless logics, that can certainly be a driving force in the struggle. The idea of the human strike borrows a lot from Bertolt Brecht—from what he described as a process of « estrangement » within the power relationships that constitute who we are—in order to produce events in this interval in the normal flow of things. I don't think there is anything coquettish about our use of different languages. It stems from the fact that we were born elsewhere and left for no particular reason, except perhaps the fact of no longer being at home. The contradictions, power relations, and violence that one's own language buries or blunts become manifest when you use a language that isn't your own. The struggle with meaning then gives form to what Deleuze and Guattari claimed to find in Kafka:  the « foreign language within language ». Basically, this is what artists are trying to speak. The promise of community rests solely in this impropriety ».   Claire Fontaine interviewed by John Kelsey, available on the artist's web site