On the occasion of Milan Art Week 2023 (opening on Tuesday, April 11 at h.18 BASE Milan; on view until Sept. 1) “Cancel patriarchy”, a site-specific light installation by collective artist Claire Fontaine makes its debut in the ground hall entrance of the culture center on Via Bergognone. The installation welcomes the audience with the monumental phrases “Patriarchy kills (love) and We are all clitoridian women”, explicitly questioning our usual emotional and social context. It brings into the architectural space issues that show how the personal is (always) political. The presence of the illuminated text in the space changes our reading of reality and interacts with the bodies that pass through it. “Patriarchy in fact is us”, the artist says, “and it is up to each and each one to get rid of it starting from one’s own feelings and need for love and unsatisfied life”.
The installation is a tribute to Carla Lonzi, in which the “clitoral woman” represents the pleasure
revolutionary denied by the oppressor, the unexpected subject who, outside the grids of
usual readings of society, rises up and makes new possibilities of freedom appear. “The title evokes the idea that the invisibilization of the perpetrators of acts of patriarchal oppression should be applied to patriarchy as a systemic force, since it is not its reform but its abolition that constitutes the artist’s horizon”.
Claire Fontaine is a collective artist founded by James Thornhill and Fulvia Carnevale in
2004 in Paris. She has been living and working in Palermo since 2017. Her name is a pseudonym that could be the proper name of a French woman but is actually inspired by famous ready-made,
Duchamp’s urinal (Fontaine) and a famous French stationery brand (Clairefontaine). Pseudonymity creates a space of desubjectification in which artists who adopt this name can experiment freely, without needing to feel constrained by their gender, race or birth class. Using different media-such as sculpture, painting, video, light writing, and literary and theorists – and refusing the obligation to adopt a recognizable vocabulary of forms in her own work, Claire Fontaine prefers an experimental research approach, a continuous exploration, often making use of détournement and citation.
The artist’s practice, in continuity with the positions of the historical avant-gardes, does not
focuses on individual genius and the excellence of singularity, but seeks the activation of the
forces and forms contained within art history, highlighting its potential political.
According to the artist, in fact, there is a use value of images that consists in their power to move our bodies and thoughts, in illuminating the sensible. In this sense, the installation Cancel patriarchy ties in with the tradition of visual poetics that has animated various voices in conceptual art such as those of Bruce Nauman and Barbara Kurger. Claire Fontaine’s use of language is always aimed at illuminating the relationships of force that condition us and the compromises we make in order not to oppose the forces that oppress us.
Forming a bridge between Milan Art Week and Design Week, the installation Cancel patriarchy by Claire Fontaine is part of a specific space of storytelling and exhibition promoted by BASE Milano: We Will Design, a path of experimentation that goes on throughout the year with international residencies and exchanges and that for 2023 is developed around the acronym I.D.E.A. – Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility. Four dimensions and hundreds of intersections and nuances that intertwine the lives of nearly eight billion people on the planet of every gender, race, age, ability, and culture.
