光泉 SPACE : WINTER (TOKYO)

Wintertime at 光泉 Space, Lucie Fontaine’s Tokyo satellite has been animated by a series of cooking workshops organized in collaboration with Berlin-based food designer Silvia Barna. The workshops were based on recipes for cookies reproducing artworks by Lucie Fontaine and by other artists – such as Christopher Wool and Sol LeWitt – as well as objects with a strong aura, such as ex-votos and ancient plates.

The title of the project is “It’s Gonna Spoil, It’s Gonna Spoil!!!” and it is related to “We Are All Clitoridian Women: Notes on Carla Lonzi’s Legacy” an essay written by Claire Fontaine for e-flux journal # 47 09/2013; in the text, Claire Fontaine defines Italian feminist Carla Lonzi as “a politically creative subjectivity,” while toward the end of the essay Claire Fontaine writes that “Women give love an independent value, while men give it an instrumental one. ‘And then men’, she writes, ‘recuperate this love as an absolute value in the arts, in poetry, in the artworks that live and grow through these non-relationships. Therefore men, after preventing [women] from living love, offer to them its symbol as an object.’”

Following this interpretation, understanding “an object” as “an {art} object” Lucie Fontaine decided that making cookies for your beloved ones can become a form of self-awareness similar to the one advocated by Lonzi. The act of transforming artworks into cookies comes from the desire to lower their conceptual aura – an act that follows Piero Manzoni’s seminal piece Uovo con impronta (1960) – in order to make it even stronger. In other words if Manzoni boiled eggs, put his fingerprint, and gave them to the audience – to whoever attended the exhibition – Lucie Fontaine takes a group of artworks, turns them into cookies and gives them to her beloved ones in a new form of “Politically Creative Subjectivity.”

光泉 Space, Lucie Fontaine’s Tokyo satellite, is located at 1-23-3 Kitazawa, Setagaya-ku, Tōkyō-to and is open by appointment only. For more details about this project check http://www.l-f-s-t.com/#!store/c23re