The Airplant Project -Serendipity, Williams House, Virginia, USA (project)

"THE AIRPLANT PROJECT IS A THINK TANK DEDICATED TO THE INVESTIGATION OF THE ARTIST'S PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE PHYSICALLY ESTRANGED FROM A GREATER COMMUNITY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTERMEDIARY COMMUNITIES FOR THE EXPANSION AND REUNIFICATION OF A DIALOG KNOWN AS "THE STATE OF THE CONTEMPORARY ARTS".

Justin Hunter Allen and Lucy Kirkman, Serendipity, William’s House, Virginia, USA             

Stranger states, no longer real

These images from the Redux archive in different ways possess aspects of an inexistent property or proposition [they no longer exist, or are 'buried' away, having been shown maybe obscurely, once, consigned now in storage]. Some still exist, but none are known, or exhibited subsequently. Or they are made on material that perishes. They are in most cases transversal, made on journeys and although numerous have no singularity. Or are lost performances, and even more so lost photographs of lost moments [the original in both cases no longer exists]. This 'inexistence' is arguably theorised by Alain Badiou as a contemporary 'event'. I would argue deriving from a domestic situation, it traces the formless, or unobserved, abject, 'l'informe'. They are duplicate, simulative, no longer important, unofficial, yet they have as their subject, a segregated history, in works that have also considered disappearance, or disaster, as the penumbra or shadow of an historical event [they constitute the disorder of a  moment of disappearance of a disappearance, as in ‘Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard’ by Mallarmé whose poem of a shipwreck, as an apparently chance occurrence in the construction of a system, is void at core, a disappearance set upon the disappearance of its systemic violence of serendipity. The earlier work, leftover, residual, of finite duration, are 'seconds', made in the act of forgetting, in drawings or doodles, remains and stains in the margins, but could be said to belong to a category of the eternally overlooked, to stand to the inaccessible Real  before the storm from heaven.

The idea of documenting these missing works, and of locating them specifically in a house that is at times cut off from the mainland by the sea, is even more so another inexistence - as the shipwreck might conjure in the imagination of void, whose imagination collapses.

The 'achillea', or what grows from the wound in the 'act' of unpremeditated salvage or repair, as a culture growing from the rusty blade, is as such an undervalued, yet fragile relation to an unexcavated ‘cause’, here allegorised in the mythology of Achilles.