The Method of Magic Materialism

Claire Fontaine, Giovanbattista Tusa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

In the first session of the X-Centric Futures Debates at the Carpintarias de São Lázaro, the artist collective Claire Fontaine presents their Method of Magic Materialism, developed to regroup a set of skills that have been discredited for political reasons. It is a materialism that derives from feminism, and its principal aim is to restore subjectivity for those creatures who have been objectified by patriarchy – women, gender non-conforming persons, people of color, children, and the natural world. Claire Fontaine’s method values reproductive work as much as productive work, it sees reproduction as a re-creation of one’s own subjectivity and collective relation space, it sees the body not as an exploitable mechanism but as a site of revolutionary potential and a battleground.