Wolbachiopolis

May 26-June 18 2017
Birds Hut, Cementa Festival
Kandos, Australia

 

“With these two sculptural projects (referring to Rodin’s failed commissions, Gates of Hell and Balzac), I would say, one crosses the threshold of the logic of the monument, entering the space of what could be called its negative condition-a kind of sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place. Which is to say one enters modernism, since it is the modernist period of sculptural production that operates in relation to this loss of site, producing the monument as abstraction, the monument as pure marker or base, functionally placeless and largely self-referential.” - Rosalind Krauss, Sculpture in the Expanded Field

 

Wolbachiopolis is a memorial plaque honoring two important moments from the history of evolution and genetic modification: the moment Charles Darwin had a Platypus shot so that he could study the animal, and the introduction of Wolbachia bacteria into the mosquitos that carry Dengue fever, in hopes of eradication of the disease.

Inspired by a plaque found on a rock in Manhattan's Inwood Park marking the place where the Lenape "sold" the island to the Dutch, our pedestal will be a large trash bag placed on site at Bird’s Hut. Situated on this is our plaque dated year the 2511, commemorating the release of the infected mosquitos in 2011.

By placing this work at a location that has no connection to the events commemorated, we are taking Krauss's modernist contextless monument and rooting it’s power here, transferring it’s autonomous meaning to the site.