Artist: Claire Fontaine
Exhibition title: Speechless
Curated by: Andrea Rodríguez Novoa, Veronica Valentini
Venue: HAUS Espacio de Artes y Prácticas Contemporáneas, Barcelona, Spain
Date: October 5 – November 29, 2024
Photography: ©Leafhopper project (Blanca Galindo y david simón Martret), all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and HAUS espacio de arte y prácticas contemporáneas, Barcelona
What is our peace made of?
Is it a lone experience?
Does it depend on our relationships with others? Is it a dynamic balance, a fragile coexistence, a resourceful mutually beneficial interaction that must remain within its boundaries – not to get harmful, like a medicine whose doses need to be carefully regulated?
Do we walk on eggshells not to be crushed by the authority of the people we owe to emotionally or by the revenge that the current
political situation enables people in power to inflict on us?
Where does our dignity sit when we enjoy ourselves or when we work for money (to later enjoy ourselves or pay our bills)?
Is our survival elegant, meaningful?
Can we afford to make friends? To be attractive – or attracted – to others?
What does this peace, that we sacrifice everything to entail?
Is it a good arrangement? Is it paralyzing and crippling? Is it just the lesser evil?
Can we afford, from this position of peace, to truly understand what is going on around us or do we need to shut down to protect ourselves (and our loved ones)?
What is healthy and justified distress for the current political and economic condition and what is just a personal depressive condition
that we are responsible for and should take care of?
Where do we draw the boundaries? If we are a cis-male person, can we hear about this from a woman without wanting to kill her?
If we are a woman, can we risk telling a man that his mental balance is unstable without this being the very last time that we were right?
Is capitalism a form of violence because it hides reality and replaces it with a commercial fiction? Has it changed the flavor of food, the smell of things, the look and experience of nature? Has capitalism destroyed cities as places where a creative life is possible?
Is money interfering with every single perception of ours? With our own body? Is the absence of money the absence of peace? And if yes how much is our peace worth? Can we price it? Do we have to pay for it? Can we call ‘peace’ something that can so easily swing outside of our control? Something that is so necessary and yet so fragile? Isn’t having this experience of peace already a consequence of a silent war? Is fear an inevitable companion or must we abandon it to truly begin to think?
Is this text already unacceptable because it troubles our peace? Should we establish a diet for the soul? Is commodity and commercial imagery good to look at? Is it safer for our bodies and souls than art or the news? What is it safe to read for us and our children? Is history good to know or is it too distressing?
Like talking about Zionism and anti-semitism at the family table? Like talking about racism? Or patriarchy?
Or sexual repression and sexual hypocrisy? About the poison of the politically correct? About the way we use the “news” not to investigate the processes of creation of visibility and invisibility but to build our ‘position’?
Why do we believe what we are being told and don’t question our position of receivers of information? Why don’t we transform our minds into weapons of mass destruction from the straightjackets that they have been put into? Why do we accept manipulation as a fatality? Why do we live with targeted advertisements and telephones that eavesdrop?
What if all this was more harmful than the covid vaccine? Why don’t we accept misinformation as a permanent human condition and talk to each other to establish each other’s reality and each other’s doubts so that no one gets sucked into the spiral of paranoia?
Is a poem real? Is an artwork real? Or is it all in the head, precisely the place that we must mistrust to protect our peace?
-Claire Fontaine, December 2023
