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Claire Fontaine

Claire Fontaine’s practice constitutes an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that together seem to define contemporary society. For Manifesta 9, she exhumes the recent history of Pripyat, a city founded in 1970, three kilometers away from Chernobyl. Evacuated after the nuclear disaster, it was once the symbol of a very specific dream of Soviet progress, namely that of energetic self-sufficiency. Pripyat was designated a “model city” according to Soviet standards, and was entirely inhabited by the workers of the nuclear plant. The house of culture was a site for cultural events but it also served as a gathering place for local residents, who enjoyed very good salaries and the most prolific families of the Soviet Union. The neon is extinguished in all existing images of the location; here it acts as a reminder of the disaster, or as a warning come too late. The constant danger posed by nuclear disasters forms part of an intolerable state of emergency that is in fact the rule rather than the exception. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Walter Benjamin wrote that the redemption of mankind will be to accept our entire past as citable (1968:254). This work signals the enduring contradictions inherent in progress, alluding to the possibility of redemption, while serving to remind us of an irreparable catastrophe. CF