Three-year international art pilgrimage
The Daedalus Project
A shared flight across borders, disciplines and time.
The name
After the fall, the flight continues.
The Daedalus Project takes its name from the ancient myth of Daedalus and Icarus. Daedalus created wings as a means of escape; Icarus flew too close to the sun and fell.
For The Reincarnation Factory, this myth is inseparable from Aero(nwen)—whose name already carried the idea of flight. Yet the project does not remain with the fall. It begins there and asks another question:
What if flight could become a shared act?
A living structure
The journey is the artwork.
The Daedalus Project is a travelling art project bringing artists together across borders, continents and disciplines. It is not conceived as a fixed exhibition transported from one place to another, but as a living structure.
With every stage, new artists, encounters and perspectives enter the work. The project changes through those who participate in it. The road, the relationships and the transformations it produces become part of the artwork.
Why Marfa?
A thin place
Marfa is more than the first location. It is the spiritual source of the journey. In the high desert, silence acquires a tangible weight. Hard light and the distant horizon disturb the ordinary sense of scale, making the boundary between the visible and the transcendent appear unusually permeable.
Marfa was also the journey Aero(nwen) was meant to make. After that journey was interrupted, Reinout Zeeger and Leen Defoer travelled there one year later with Aero(nwen)’s boots. Beneath a solitary streetlight, absence became a form of presence. Daedalus departs from that same threshold: not by denying loss, but by refusing to let loss have the final word.
The inner journey
Transformation through passage
The three-year journey is physical, artistic and spiritual. Leaving familiar surroundings changes the conditions under which artists see, think and create. Distance opens a space in which fixed identities can loosen and new relationships—with the self, with others and with the world—can emerge.
Daedalus is therefore intended to have a transformative effect on every participant. Artists do not merely contribute work to the project; they enter a shared passage. Each stage asks them to encounter other landscapes, practices and ways of being, and to allow those encounters to alter their own work and inner orientation.
The three-year passage
Marfa
The source
In 2027, six established Belgian artists and The Wittgenstein Dope Surfers gather in the Texas desert. Marfa becomes laboratory, stage and point of departure.
Westward
The journey
The project travels westward from Texas, through Las Vegas and toward a secret location between San Francisco and Los Angeles. American artists join the constellation, and every encounter alters its direction.
West Coast
The tower
Artists from different parts of the world come together to create the Tower of Transformation: a collective structure, intervention and beacon for change.
Transformism in action
Not an escape from the world, but an attempt to change it.
Daedalus does not romanticise the fall of Icarus or present suffering as the necessary price of creation. Guided by Transformism, it asks how vulnerability can be met by connection, how isolation can become collaboration, and how art can transform pain without glorifying it.
The journey culminates in the Tower of Transformation, marking a shift from representation to intervention. However modest its measurable effect may be, the Tower is conceived to make a concrete contribution to reducing global warming: art entering the architecture of the world it seeks to transform.
We do not fly alone.