On Fire
In 2019, then 16 years old Greta Thunberg gave the famous speech in Davos beginning with the words “our house is on fire” concluding with the statement: “I don’t want your hope, (…) I want you to panic, I want you to act as if it is an emergency, as if our house is on fire, because it is”. Five years later the temperature on our planet has kept on rising and last summer has been the hottest to date since temperatures have been recorded on earth. The climate crisis is no longer just the subject of scientific warnings and climate activists‘ demands; it has now also begun to affect the Global North. Behind the name Claire Fontaine are Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, who repeatedly use striking advertising media such as light boxes and neon tubes for their work. Five light boxes depicting fire emojis have been installed at the Museum Gunzenhauser in the former headquarters of Sparkasse Chemnitz. „Partly for the love of concision and partly out of shyness, we have become accustomed to use these prefabricated images in our exchanges rather than translating feeling with words. – Emojis are our hieroglyphics, pictograms to describe the spiritual and the trivial.“, says Claire Fontaine. Visible from afar, the signs express our undirected panic, warning and demanding – without naming exactly what.