Europe
Claire Fontaine
Foreigners Everywhere (Italian)
2006
Claire Fontaine, Foreigners Everywhere (Italian), 2006.
Foreigners Everywhere is a series of neon signs in several different languages. Named for Stranieri Ovunque, an anarchist collective from Turin, the work embodies and projects the ambivalence of their name into various sites and contexts. Lacking context, the neon suggests a factual statement, xenophobic threat, and evokes the estrangement of feeling foreign in a global society, a circumstance legible by the targeted populations.
Claire Fontaine is a collective artist established by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill in 2004 and whose name refers to Marcel Duchamp’s seminal Fontaine piece and a French brand of school notebooks. Claire Fontaine has declared herself a “ready-made artist”, engaging in a form of neo-conceptual practice that restlessly questions form, singularity, and authorship. Spanning neon, video, sculpture, painting, and text, Claire Fontaine’s practice voluntarily retreats from questions of style to blend in with industrial forms and modes of production already used by American conceptual artists and the proponents of minimal art in the 1960s and 1970s. Through the appropriation and diversion of aesthetic cannons and grammars, akin to a form of post-modern uncanniness, Claire Fontaine addresses manifestations of failure, helplessness, and standardization in the clutch of social, political, cultural, and financial systems that define and structure contemporary Western societies.