Interview with Celine Conderelli

For the exhibition Out of Office (Still Here) Quiller MacQuarrie conducted interviews with various artists. This interview iswith Celine Conderelli, the creator of the installation Limits to Play. This work invites visitors to walk through overlapping sports fields marked with the years women were first permitted to compete in international tournaments — rights that were sometimes later revoked. The work highlights how sport and play are defined by boundaries that regulate movement, restrict access, and reflect the culturally determined rules that decide who is allowed to participate.

Quiller:

How do you see your work connects to the themes of the exhibition: access to free time and leisure in relation to the summer vacation?

Celine:

The question of free time has always appeared to me as structural —meaning it's never simply about what you do with time, but about who has access to it in the first place, and under what conditions. My work is often concerned with support structures: the frameworks, both physical and social, that make certain things possible and others not. Leisure is one of those things that might to some people appear to be freely available but is in fact heavily conditioned —by race, by class, by gender, by the kind of labour your body is expected to perform. So the exhibition's premise feels close to questions I already inhabit.

Quiller:

Does your artistic practice feel more like leisure/play or work/labor?

Celine:

Both! I think the tension between those categories is part of what makes it interesting. There is genuine pleasure in research, in following a line of thought, in the making of something —what I'd call the speculative dimension of practice. But it is also undeniably work, with all the economic and social conditions that word implies. And it also doesn’t become less work with time. I’m allergic to narratives that romanticise artistic practice as play, because by doing that they obscure the work —and the real, endless, underpaid labour of those who support the conditions in which art gets made. That said, I do think there is something of play —in the sense of open-endedness, of not knowing quite where you'll end up— that I try to hold onto.

Quiller:

What is your favorite memory from a summer period?

Celine:

I’m assuming you mean childhood summer holidays – from which i remember most fondly the boundless sense of time stretching to the horizon.

Quiller:

What do you like to do with your free time?

Celine:

I don’t have free time.

Quiller:

Limits to Play sheds light on physical but also metaphorical lines in which people are excluded from. In this specific work, each colored line connects to the year women were allowed to play that sport in public tournaments. What kinds of exclusionary lines are being prohibited from crossing today and to whom?

Celine:

The lines in Limits to Play make visible something that is usually rendered invisible –the historical fact that access to sport, to physical public life, to leisure itself, has been always been legislated and either given or withheld, never freely taken. The dates are recent enough to be uncomfortable. What the work asks, I think, is: what are the equivalent lines being drawn now, and who is drawing them? Trans people, and particularly trans women, are the most visible current example —where inclusion in sport has become a decoy for a much broader set of questions about (lack of) bodily autonomy, recognition, and who counts as a legitimate subject. But I'd also point to the ways race and class continue to determine access to sport and leisure in ways that are structural rather than explicit, or to the ongoing underfunding of women's sport compared to men's. The lines shift; the logic of exclusion tends to remain.

Quiller:

Sports are central to the leisure industry and most consumption of professional sports is done by men. There are still limits in which some people can play and participate. Trans people, for example particularly trans women, are not being allowed to play in elite sports. Do these concepts resonate with your work and if so how?

Celine:

Yes, very directly. The work began from a specific historical inquiry —when did women gain formal access?— but it was always also a question about the present. The exclusion of trans women from elite sport is, to me, continuous with the history the work traces: it is the same fictional logic of biological essentialism being used to police who belongs in a particular category of person, and what that might mean in terms of what they are and are not allowed to do, taken to determine who has rights to public physical life. What I find infuriating is how quickly this becomes normalised —how the debate is framed as a neutral question of fairness rather than a political act of exclusion. The lines in the work are meant to make that kind of normalisation harder.

Quiller:

Your work also reminds me of Foucault's ideas surrounding the panopticon. A structure where your body is surveilled, regulated, watched, and guided. Would you say that these limits to play, or sports lines can be seen as panoptic structures?

Celine:

Foucault is useful here, yes —particularly his writing on discipline and the way bodies are shaped, organised, and made productive through spatial arrangements. The sports field is a very literal example of that: it is a space of rule, measurement, and surveillance, in which bodies are constantly assessed for compliance. But I'd push slightly beyond the panopticon as a model, because it implies a relatively stable structure of watching and being watched. What interests me more is how those structures are internalised —how the line doesn't need a guard once people have understood where they're permitted to go. That internalization is, I think, where the real work of exclusion happens, and where it becomes hardest to name.