Patriarchy kills love: Claire Fontaine's installation in Milan, Italy

Patriarchy kills love: so says Cancel Patriarchy, the work by the duo Claire Fontaine (composed of Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill) that, on the occasion of Milan Art Week 2023, will be inaugurated on Tuesday, April 11, at 6 p.m. at the Ground Hall of Milan ’s BASE cultural center on Via Bergognone.

The installation Cancel patriarchy consists of two LED signs by Claire Fontaine recontextualized in BASE’s Ground Hall. Claiming that “patriarchy kills (love)” and that “we are all clitoral women,” the artist intends to give the public words that question, solicit and provoke. The title Cancel Patriarchy evokes the idea that it serves to make the ability to render invisible the perpetrators of acts of patriarchal oppression a systemic force, for it is not its reform of patriarchy but its abolition that is the artist’s horizon.

The installation greets the audience with the monumental phrases Patriarchy kills (love) and We are all clitoridian women, explicitly questioning our usual emotional and social context, and bringing into the architectural space issues that show how the personal is political. The patriarchy in fact is us, the artist says, and it is up to each and every one to get rid of it starting from their own feelings and unmet need for love and life.

The installation is also meant to be a tribute to Carla Lonzi, in which the clitoral woman represents the revolutionary pleasure denied by the oppressor, the unexpected subject who, outside society’s usual grids of reading, rises up and makes new possibilities of freedom appear.

Forming a bridge between Milan Art Week and Design Week, Claire Fontaine’s installation Cancel patriarchy is part of a precise space of storytelling and exhibition promoted by BASE Milano: We Will Design, an experimental path that goes on all year round 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 all genders, races, ages, abilities, and cultures.

This is precisely why the installation Cancel patriarchy will remain visible in the Ground Hall of the former Ansaldo until September 1, reflecting the values on which BASE is focusing its multidisciplinary research and experimentation.

The artist

James Thornhill and Fulvia Carnevale formed the duo Claire Fontaine in 2004 in Paris. They have been living and working in Palermo since 2017. Claire Fontaine’s 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). Pseudonymy 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 a variety of media-such as sculpture, painting, video, light writing, and literary and theoretical texts-and refusing the obligation to adopt a recognizable vocabulary of forms in her work, Claire Fontaine favors an experimental research approach, an ongoing exploration, often making use of détournement and citation.

The artist’s practice, in continuity with the positions of the historical avant-gardes, does not focus on individual genius and the excellence of singularity, but seeks the activation of the forces and forms contained within art history, highlighting its political potential. 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 intends to tie 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 power relations that condition us and the compromises we make in order not to oppose the forces that oppress us.

Patriarchy kills love: Claire Fontaine's installation in Milan, Italy

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