TSFPLTMT presents: FLORIDA ARCANE
Miami Downtown Library, 2010
FLORIDA ARCANE was commissioned by and exhibited at Miami Public Library's Main Downtown Branch in mid to late 2010.
FLORIDA ARCANE, a Catalog (below)
J.E. LUMMUS: The failed City in the Swamp
Mr. J.E. Lummus endeavored to capitalize on a radical late 20th-century idea of building a world-class city of industry and culture in the middle of a swamp. He was influenced by such cities as Manaus and Brasilia in Brazil. He was inspired by Julia Tuttle’s infectious optimism for Miami, yet driven by jealousy over her achievements. Mr. Lummus, seeking to construct "a portal to the future amongst gators and muck", borrowed 3 million dollars from Henry Flagler and William Brickell, both of whom invested heavily in Florida’s citrus industry and were known for their competitive business acumen. The Society for the Preservation of Lost Things and Missing Time was pleased to display images of this failed city in its perpetual stasis as the swamp reclaims it, and original documents diagraming Mr. J.E. Lummus' concepts and hand-drawn design. |
Mr. Lummus’s funds ran dry after the winter of 1895 claimed the state’s entire citrus crop. Begun deep in the southern Okefenokee, this city’s construction lost momentum quickly. To this day it remains located hidden deep in the overgrown swamp. The unnamed project was originally envisioned as a paradigm to Futurist architectural utopias, with long and linear concrete expanses between industrial complexes connected by highway-like walkways built above the roily swamp below. To those in the know it has come to symbolize the unfinished--some say failed--project that is Modernism, with its undying belief in progress and rational aesthetics.
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Missing Time: A Chancay/Tequesta Arboreal Cosmovision
Not long after the discovery of Florida, the Spanish continued toward Western North America and Central America, eventually exploring Pacific South America. In 1532, Francisco Pizarro and his army of conquistadors ambushed and captured the Emperor Atahualpa of the Inca Empire. In the following years Spain extended its rule over the empire of the Inca civilization. It was during this early campaign to subdue the mighty Inca that this tree, woven with delicate and beautiful textiles by the skilled Chancay central-coast people during the Late Intermediate Period (900-1492 AD), was acquired as a spoil of war and conquest. Not surprising, the tree was almost trashed in favor of gold and silver. Luckily, it was saved and lovingly kept in near-pristine condition by native Tequesta slaves brought from North America to aid the Spanish in their conquest. |
(above) The Tequesta were one of the earliest American Indian groups of North America mentioned by Europeans, and contact with them and their neighbors is recorded primarily in Spanish documents. The historian Antonio de Herrera provides an account of Ponce de Leon’s 1513 and 1521 exploratory trips to Florida, including a mention of a place called “Chequescha,” which is likely Tequesta.
The Tequesta instantly recognized the tree to be representative of a cosmology not unlike their own: A mythical space where the underworld, the earth and the heavens connect. Its roots, in contact with the ground, create a nexus with the past. Its trunk, anchored in the present, is linked with life through its branches, which uplift fruits to the world of the gods.
The tree eventually made its way from Peru back to Florida. Unbeknownst to the Spanish, its use as a cosmological Rosetta Stone of sorts quickly became infamous. Enslaved native Indians used it as a bridge to communication with each other, and it aided in developing a secret solidarity between the Tequesta, the Inca-Chancay, and other indigenous peoples of the Americas with their eventual resistance against the Spanish stronghold. The Society for the Preservation of Lost Things and Missing Time considers this acquisition lucky and rare. Only two other known woven cosmo-vision trees are known to be in existence. One is at the MALBA (Mueseo de Arte Latina Buenos Aires) and the other is held in a private collection in Madrid, Spain.
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Space Coast Polymath
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Born near Panama City about 1910, Jacqueline Cochran was a reporter and owned a cosmetics firm. She was also a test pilot: the first woman to break the sound barrier and fly a bomber across the Atlantic, and the first civilian woman to win a Distinguished Service Medal. Later, for her work training Venezuelan postal flyers, she received a medal from the Venezuelan Government. They erected a sizable statue in her honor at the coastal town of Coro. In 1977 she was elected to the Aviation Hall of Fame. She held more speed, altitude and distance records than any other pilot. She was a Florida Women's Hall of Fame inductee in 1992. Her obsessive love for all things aeronautical extended to many ideas: making space travel more economically viable by privatizing outer space; the aerodynamics of water fowl, and the possibility of life beyond Earth.
(above) Jacqueline Cochran’s optics were assemble as gifts received during the entire course of her life, from childhood to death. She acquired the first one from her grandmother, the American biologist Rosa Smith Eigenmann (1858-1947) and the last in 2003 from her friend, biologist Martha Chase.
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Polymath Jacqueline Cochran amassed a collection of photographs, navigation charts and instruments, optical devices, books, drawings and the like. She dedicated her years to flying machines, business, and the rigors of professional advancement. By the time of her death in 2008, she suffered from delusions and paranoia attributed to her many hours flying at supersonic speeds and regular exposure to high altitude hypoxia. Her surviving family knew of her contributions to Florida history and sought a permanent home for her collection to honor her legacy. They contacted the Society for the Preservation of Lost Things and Missing Time and we aided them in locating the storied collection. She had left a map indicating the burial site of her precious optics, snapshots, books and instruments. They were entombed in a gold-covered box beneath a shack her father built behind the family’s Cape Canaveral, Florida, home when he returned home from World War II
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The Doctor Eugene Birchwood Archives.
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The Society for the Preservation of Lost Things and Missing Time is pleased to announce an auspicious loan to our Florida Arcane exhibit. This recently acquired archive of 2 x 2 inch 35mm Super Slides belonged to Dr. Eugene Birchwood of Chicago, IL, documenting - among other things- his decades-long involvement with the Godspeed Airstream trailer community. Little is yet known about the wandering group of Airstream enthusiasts. However, of interest to the Society is Dr. Eugene Birchwood's documentation of his travels as they had a direct relationship with his scholarly work. According to a diary found with the slides, the good Doctor's travels were vital to his research seeking ley lines, power points, and other mystic convergences of energy around the planet. While in Florida Dr. Birchwood conducted his now infamous work along shorelines, canals, lakes, and other waterways.
Dr. Birchwood’s slides add to the puzzle of his work, a veritable repository of scholarly texts, strange objects, scribbled computations and endless notes. His correspondences with literary, artistic and philosophical luminaries were numerous. They reveal as much about his personal motives as they do the trajectory of his future work. 
(above) Dr. Eugene Birchwood, conducting research in Florida. Circa 1973
(above) Dr. Eugene Birchwood's trusty Hermes 2000
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 (above) Dr. Birchwood’s letters to Mr. J.L.B are in the possession of the J.L.B estate and were not made available to TSFPLTMT : FLORIDA ARCANE exhibit. However, the TSFPLTMT does have several letters from J.L.B. to Dr. Birchwood. The above mentioned was originally inscribed in Binary code (pictured here) , as the two friends enjoyed mental games with codes, and puzzles linking their friendship with infinity.
Always looking for the “lines connecting us to the ether, to the stars, to the ground and to each other”, the benevolent Doctor enjoyed a particularly intense friendship with one J.L.B. His attuned sensitivity to the metaphysical and sublime was made alarmingly clear in the letters exchanged with J.L.B during the months preceding his death , as evidenced by J.L.B’s candid and poetic reply: “Whenever I feel sad or sorrowful, I think of death. That is my comfort: to know, for a fact, that I will one day cease to be. I have the certainty - and this beyond some fears of the religious kind that I do harbor -... that I will someday end utterly, and that is a great relief...immortality represents, to me, the worst possible punishment: I believe that any persistent state will eventually turn into misfortune. All things in this world are fortunately fleeting and ephemeral; life would otherwise soon become tedious.” ~ J.L.B, B.A, 1973 |
MISSING TIME, MISSING PEOPLE
A memory of a dream of a place as recalled in a story from somewhere that somehow kept being retold until the story was no longer a dream and the dream was no longer a memory and the memory was only a set of photographs handed down from one generation to the next:
The Heroines of Suffrage, Women of The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW),
and PTA mom's of the 80's.
The Heroines of Suffrage, Women of The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW),
and PTA mom's of the 80's.
Saving Sylvilagus Floridanus.
In the mid 1980s, while surveying for a new runway at Miami International Airport, surveyor Carie B. Litton became enamored with Sylvilagus Floridanus, the common Easter Cottontail rabbits that populated the field’s hundreds of acres. After taking one home to keep as a pet, he soon became their ardent defender and began a campaign to preserve their natural habitat. Mr. Litton’s employment was terminated by the Miami Port Authority for actively protesting the construction during work hours. During this period of unemployment, he organized humble protests with the local chapter of PETA and spared no effort in furthering the cause of saving Sylvilagus Floridanus’s native domain.
The Society for the Preservation of Lost Things and Missing time is delighted to have in our possession artifacts from Mr. Litton’s tumultuous years as crusader for Sylvilagus Floridanus.
The Society for the Preservation of Lost Things and Missing time is delighted to have in our possession artifacts from Mr. Litton’s tumultuous years as crusader for Sylvilagus Floridanus.
(above) Surveyor Carie B. Litton
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(above) Known habitats of Sylvilagus Floridanus at Miami International Airports, 1997
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(above) Canie R. Litton's first Sylvilagus Floridanus, sometime during the mid 1990s.
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The Shady Side (3)
Danny Harold Rolling, the Gainesville Ripper, was convicted for the rape and murder of 4 college students in 1990 and executed in 1994. Before police found him, he hid in a field in Ocala, FL. When police discovered him, he was reading from this book, William Shakespeare’s “Tragedies”.
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“Or even the state of Florida, where they are prepared to execute children. Umm, well, you hope that at least that there is something there to be claimed. “ ~
Edwidge Danticat
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(above) During a heavy thunderstorm, on the night of February 29th, 1988, while traveling from Hialeah to Naples, this car veered off Alligator Alley and into a canal 3 miles east of Big Cypress National Preserve. None of the occupants survived
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