VSF is pleased to present Jesper Just’s first solo exhibition at Various Small Fires. In the Main Gallery is a single-channel video projection of Llano (2012), filmed on location among the dusty Antelope Valley ruins of the failed Socialist-utopian desert city Llano del Rio in north-eastern Los Angeles County. The film seeks to explore this ruin, both as a concept and as an historical and archaeological object, full of inherent dualities: at its origin, the promise of an ideal community; in its present state, an empty, forgotten space. Llano del Rio’s architect, Alice Constance Austin, imagined a proto-feminist gender-neutral design, including communal kitchens located in tunnels between the homes, intended to liberate women from domestic work. The settlement was ultimately abandoned in 1918 after its water rights were lost in a lawsuit. Llano revisits this landscape, observing a woman as she struggles to reconstruct architectural remnants. An apparatus of pipes and tubes, typically used on film sets, floods the ruin with artificial rain, a poetic intervention of cinematic illusion. The ensuing struggle between (wo)man and nature evokes Georg Simmel’s essay “The Ruin” (1911), in which he argued that architecture could be seen as the epitome of this struggle; once architecture begins to disintegrate, the forces of man and nature combine and grow into a different, natural phenomenon.
Screening in the Project Room is a film that first appeared in Just’s most recent solo show Servitudes (2015) at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Servitudes follows a young female character, The Child, marked by a physical disability, and her movements within an urban space, specifically the equally iconic and controversial One World Trade Center in Manhattan. The tower, both the setting and a character itself, appears as an urban appendage, a metal and concrete prosthetic of the city.
