Claire Fontaine, Foreigners Everywhere (Creole), 2010, CFO35 | Artworks | Mennour

2010

Medium

Néon (rouge rubis) suspendu, mural ou monté en vitrine, verre 8mm, cadre, transformateur électronique et câbles / Suspended, wall or window mounted neon (Ruby Red), 8mm glass, framework, electronic transformer and cables

Dimensions

10 × 127 cm

Status

For Sale

Price

On request

Collect24 Art ID

C24-188717

Works from the Foreigners Everywhere (2004/24) series feature texts taken from quotidian conversations proliferating in the public sphere—their political significance often diminished through repetition. In this case, the words express a xenophobia that is all too common. With the Foreigners Everywhere series (2004–), the text is an appropriation of an appropriation (a gesture typical of several of Claire Fontaine’s works) in that the phrase is taken from the name of a collective from Turin, Italy, who engaged in antiracist practice in the early 2000s. Moreover, this series displays a translation of the eponymous phrase in several languages; in its recent iteration at the 2024 Venice Biennial it placed the phrase in more than twenty different languages alongside one another. This practice highlights the ethics of language and exclusions inherent in any process of translation. We can reflect upon the fact that the phrase “Foreigners Everywhere” does not have the same significance when displayed in Italy as it does in Palestine. We bear witness to the heightened political charge of language in which context floods words with a supralinguistic meaning. Language calls us to attend to the subtle violence of translation that appears in the fantasy that meaning is equivalent from one language to another, when in fact such operations obscure what is excluded in the transaction. From Anita Chari, A User’s Manual to Claire Fontaine, Ch. 2