Interview by Christabel Stewart
Portrait by Christa Holka

CS Was it a risk to let Foreigners Everywhere (2004), your ongoing series of neon signs displaying the phrase in several languages, be used by curator Adriano Pedrosa as the title for the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024?

CF Naming the 60th Venice Biennale after our controversial artwork was Adriano Pedrosa’s idea. The main risk was that our work could have been read as merely a comment on the Biennale rather than its source, and that it would be associated with all the other artworks in the Biennale. That would mean that we wouldn’t always be acknowledged as the inspiration for the concept. These things happened, but we survived them. In a historical moment where the number of displaced people is unprecedentedly high, and the respect of universal human rights is at its lowest, “foreigners everywhere” might also mean that people feel like foreigners everywhere – they don’t feel represented by their governments, and they don’t identify with their own nations. And there are more foreigners everywhere than ever before, and this fact isn’t always met with enthusiasm. Adriano Pedrosa’s proposal was even more interesting given the nationalistic structure of the Venice Biennale, where artists who exhibit in the national pavilions are meant to “represent” their country. We thought that Adriano Pedrosa’s message was also a way of honouring our friendship, our shared sensibility, and of questioning the aesthetic reverberations of the racist culture and the fear of the Other shaping current mainstream discourse. 

CS At your 2024 exhibition Show Less at Mimosa House, you created a publicly viewable neon sign declaring “FATHERFUCKER”. How was the linguistic shift from the very common “motherfucker” received? 

CF FATHERFUCKER (2024) was indeed received with much commotion. Unfortunate isolated episodes – a middle-aged man kicking the gallery door down on two different occasions and a phone call threatening legal action – forced Mimosa House to have a security guard on the premises for the duration of the exhibition. It turned out that there was no real danger, but just a lot of emotional reactivity to the piece. The guards confirmed that nearly all passersby had some sort of reaction, positive or negative, which is precisely what one wants from an artwork. Street-facing artworks in vitrines, especially if they’re text-based, are noticed as semiotic elements typical of the city landscape, but in the gallery neon signs have a different intensity from their commercial use, above a nail salon or bar. They can catch people off guard. FATHERFUCKER explicitly evoked the Epstein files. A motherfucker is soiling the father’s property, but a fatherfucker is doing something so common and culturally diffused that it doesn’t crystallise as an insult. And yet, it calls attention to normalised predatory behaviour that has been banalised for centuries. 

CS In 2016 you participated in the “Risk Summit” at Birkbeck, where you briefly mentioned a future risk project. I’m keen to hear how risk is both subject and object for you. 

CF Our reality and therefore our work has been saturated with risk for the past 25 years. We have tackled our obsession with the house as a “safe” space that excludes the dangers of the outside world, when in reality, we know that globally you’re most at risk of violence in the home. We made an exhibition entitled Protection in 2023, where we reflected on the fact that protection is often offered by the very people who are the actual threat. They are essentially asking to be bribed in order to spare us from their aggression. The distribution of risk is more shocking than the distribution of wealth, because it manifests in instances of violent spectacle, rather than everyday misery. A few days ago, 116 people died drowning in the freezing sea off the Sicilian coast, where we live. They were trying to flee persecution, torture and famine, while we celebrated Christmas in our warm homes. In a few months, we will swim in the same waters where their bodies sank. 

CS What’s riskier: living a “normal” life, or understanding what is truly happening around us – censorship, extinction, genocides? Is your work a call to action or awareness?

CF Our work is not a call to action. Art is fundamentally different from whistle-blowing: it does not involve the same risks, consequences or repression that accompany militant activity. It is an exploration and an experiment rather than an explanation. One of its possible effects may be a clearer awareness of one’s own position — emotional, sensory, or political — and a deeper understanding of context. But we do not frame or restrict interpretations of our artworks. We share tools when asked or when it is possible to make them public, while acknowledging that artists are not always the most lucid interpreters of their own work. Claire Fontaine articulates her reading of reality directly through her works, because we believe ambiguity and self-censorship are harmful to art. When freedom of expression is neither exercised nor challenged, it fades away. It is dangerous to numb our senses or allow ourselves to be silenced by violence and intimidation. In the end, this leads to an irreparable erosion of dignity – the foundation of subjectivity and self-worth. Art that does not challenge the status quo or strive for greater physical, moral and mental freedom inevitably becomes a contrived and opportunistic expression, rendered acceptable only by refusing to push the limits of perception and experience. Culture is a symbolic force that shapes our forms of life. After the Second World War, we should have learned that when culture and art lose credibility – when they lack the integrity to resist cruelty – a bleak descent into violence and confusion begins, one that can take decades to reverse. This is not a moral claim but a practical one: we all need transcendence to live healthy and fulfilling lives. Adorno’s position is no longer sufficient: we have not addressed the fact that culture became a “pile of debris” after Auschwitz precisely because we failed to create a space where freedom of expression could become freedom of action. Our anthropology remains dishonest, lacking a genuine concern for collective emancipation. We live in a time of profound injustice, in which world peace is being dismantled by leaders who disregard the fragility of global order and use force and propaganda to dominate and destroy civilian lives. If this does not disturb us deeply, it may indicate that our sensitivity has become too dulled to perceive the subtleties of any artwork. For this reason, we tend to doubt the judgement of those who are indifferent to the realities of oppression. .