"Foreigners Everywhere"
The title of this post is also the title of the 2024 Venice Biennale, curated by Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa. It’s taken from the name of a series of neon sculptures in a variety of languages by the artist Claire Fontaine. In turn, Claire Fontaine acknowledge appropriating the term from an anarchist collective in Turin, Stranieri Ovunque.
White Sight (2023).
In a final link to this chain, as many of you know, Claire Fontaine created a neon sculpture called “White Sight” (2023), a photo of which graces the cover of my book. I take vicarious pleasure the new prominence of Claire Fontaine’s radical practice.
Pedrosa is not only the first Biennale curator from South America, he’s also the first from the global South as a whole. The exhibit will have both a contemporary and a historical “nucleus,” with which to consider colonialism, diaspora and “artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, and refugees—especially those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North.”
“Foreigners Everywhere” will be rightly perceived as the opposite of the present far-right government in Italy, under Giorgia Meloni. Pedrosa imagines “Foreigners Everywhere” as “a celebration of the foreign, the distant, the outsider, the queer, as well as the indigenous.”
The Meloni regime has been pitching the country to tourists, using a much-ridiculed avatar created from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c.1485).
Drawn from the figure of Venus, she claims to be a “virtual influencer.” Such banality is beyond parody. Claire Fontaine’s conceptual ready-mades need to be understood at this visualized intersection of gender and racial capital, as much as within the often rather hermetic discourses of the art world.
Chatting with Claire Fontaine
I will reflect on Claire Fontaine’s work by interspersing some ideas with extracts from their texts, which constitute a substantial part of their project. In other words, a conversation. During the pandemic I was involved in a series of zoom meetings, email threads and Signal chats that also involved Claire Fontaine’s “assistants” Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill. The small “Strike Collective” forum was where we engaged most. Looking back on the surviving threads, I am struck by the intensity and engagement produced by the pandemic’s panic. I almost miss it.
Claire Fontaine’s concept of “human strike”—a strike against the current hierarchical construction of the human, a strike against the “economic, affective, sexual and emotional positions within which subjects are imprisoned”—seemed all too relevant as biopolitical lockdown intersected with the George Floyd Uprising against white supremacy and the police.
Writing with resonant intelligence, and with a deep integration of post-68 French philosophical practice, Marxism, Italian feminism and “anarchist” political thinking, Claire Fontaine creates challenging but vital writings. Their must-read compilation Human Strike is available from Sémiotext(e). Thinking in dialogue with them makes my work sharper, and highlights where it needs to be expanded.
For me it started with the art. I think Capitalism Kills Love (above) was the first piece I really noticed because it chimed so exactly with conversations in and around Occupy Wall Street. Formally, it took the neon art of modernists like Bruce Nauman and transformed it into something that was at once personal, political and public.
As soon as I first saw Foreigners Everywhere, I knew exactly what it meant. I’m a person whose body is the product of multiple collapsing empires—Ottoman, Russian and British—who was not perceived by the majority as being “from” the UK where I was born and who spent many years as an “alien” in the US.
For us, communism is a redistribution of poverty more than wealth; it is a specific relationship to the chronic insufficiency that exists with us all—toward our body, our childhood, the immediate urgency of our desires. We think that love, real love, can only be communist, and that’s why love is not fully possible in our society.
Claire Fontaine, interview in BOMB
Yet I also perceived the phrase (“foreigners everywhere”) as a positive. There have been “foreigners” everywhere throughout the long histories of racial capitalism. From 1596-1601, Elizabeth I repeatedly tried to expel “blackamoors” from England, believing there to be “to manie [too many].” Four hundred and more years later, English people are still trying to “take back control.” In other words, elite racism has failed for centuries and there are foreigners everywhere and it’s a good thing.
I HAVE NO WORDS TO TELL YOU HOW MUCH I HATE THE POLICE is a quotation from the film MADE IN U.S.A. (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966), whose star Anna Karina obsessively repeats this line of dialogue throughout an entire scene.
Press release for “Foreigners Everywhere” at Reena Spaulings (2005)
I’ve also come to imagine, as Pedrosa hints, Indigenous people commenting “foreigners everywhere” to each other post-1492. Unlike Europeans, Indigenous people in the Americas ensured the survival of the new arrivals, an act of generosity whose debt has yet to be repaid. More exactly, the settler-colonial regime continues to extract from the Indigenous, most recently in the form of water. In 1857, the Supreme Court said Africans had no rights white people were bound to respect. In 2023, it said the Navajo (Diné) have no rights to water, which is to say, no right to live.
Human strike attacks the economic, affective, sexual and emotional positions within which subjects are imprisoned. It provides an answer to the question ‘how do we become something other than what we are?’ It isn’t a social movement although within the uprising and agitations it can find a fertile ground upon which to develop and grow, sometimes even against these.
Claire Fontaine, “Human Strike Has Already Begun.”
Edward Said used to say that the intellectual was an “exile,” but for Claire Fontaine, everyone is a foreigner to themselves under the regime of racial patriarchal capital. Collectively, they ask “us” to become something other. In 2020, that resonated strongly with me as the demand for “white” people to set aside white supremacy and find other ways to live.
If that has not happened at the grand level of collectivity, thinking with Claire Fontaine through 2020 and beyond has helped smaller groups, like our own Strike Collective, to engage with that work. Perhaps 2024 will mark the next stage of that project. Let’s hope so.