NO: Do you ever get concerned parties towards the kind of yonic symbolism of your work?

JC: So, like, last week, I was invited to create a backdrop for the gala for Planned Parenthood in New York. Which I was perfectly willing to do. And my suggestion ... do you know the What if Women Ruled the World digital project I did with Nadya Tolokonnikova, one of the founders of Pussy Riot?

NO: Oh, I actually don’t know about that. I know who Nadya is, but I don’t know about the project.

JC: Okay, it's gonna be represented at the Serpentine and it will be one of the three participatory aspects of the show; we're inviting people to participate in a variety of ways. I created what's called a Rainbow AR app, where people can go out in the park and make their own smoke pieces on their phones, or they could go to the building they hate the most or the biggest phallic tower in London, and they could disappear it! So that will be one participatory aspect. And then I did a big project with Serpentine and Jane Fonda and Greenpeace some years ago, called Create Art for Earth, in which we invited artists from all over the world to create art that was envisioning a different way of interacting with the earth other than destroying it. And the Serpentine is going to reactivate that; they originally got thousands of submissions from all over the world. The third way of participating will be through the project I created with Nadya, which, like many of my projects, ended up with me chasing after it saying, ‘wait, wait for me!’ It started with the project I did with Dior in 2020 for their couture show, where I had come up with the idea for an inflatable goddess from the 70s, I think there will be a photo of it in the Serpentine show along with a film of The Female Divine. I know these are long answers, but I can't help it! So it's the only time in my life that something happened that was bigger than I envisioned. Because Dior built my goddess figure 69-metres long, behind the Rodin Museum in Paris, which is a paean to masculinity. And inside the body of the goddess was Maria Grazia Chiuri’s couture show. And for that couture show, I designed a series of banners. You know what I'm talking about?

NO: Yes I know exactly what you’re talking about.

JC: What if women ruled the world, right?

NO: Sure.

JC: Ten questions in English and in French. And in fact, the French banners are going to be in the LUMA show. But anyway, the digital quilt began to evolve a couple of years ago, after I decided to collaborate with Nadya. Actually, I was inspired by her before I met her, because I had read her book, Read and Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism (2018). Anyhow, Nadya and I, at a luncheon we were invited to, quite spontaneously began to ask each other these ten questions. This luncheon was at the home of a woman who runs a Web 3.0 company called DMINTI. So, out of this luncheon developed this project idea for a digital quilt, that involved inviting people from all over the world to answer the questions too. DMINTI went to eight countries setting up video booths, and there’ll be one at the Serpentine. Okay, back to your original question. So, I suggested to Planned Parenthood that they work with DMINTI and do a huge projection of the What if Women Ruled the World digital quilt and set up a video booth so everybody at the gala could also answer the questions. Everybody loved the idea except, you know what? Planned Parenthood was very nervous about using the word women. So what I said, in my mind was, ‘Try telling that to the millions of women around the world who experience gender violence because they're women and they have vaginas.’ I'm perfectly happy to support trans rights, I don't care how people identify, they have the right to be who they want, to do what they want with their own bodies. But you know what? Don't tell me I cannot render the vulva in positive terms. When the vulva, for a huge amount of women on the planet, is an entryway to pain and suffering. It gets sewn up, it gets raped, it gets assaulted. That's, like, too much for me. It's not for me to say how people should define who they are themselves. I mean, that's not within my purview to tell you what you are, or aren't. I'm an artist. I mean, I myself have to tell you, one of my favourite places on Instagram is the Vagina Museum. I love their posts! I believe that feminism should be and is an inclusive philosophy.

Excerpt from Middle Plane Issue No.9 (Summer/Autumn 2024). Read the full interview in the magazine by ordering your copy here.

Photographer: Sharna Osborne