PREFACE TO THE ART SLAVERY CATALOG BOOK by Sandro Dernini

This book catalog illustrates, from 1982 to 2008 with a short pre-history, the story of Plexus - an unexamined part of the contemporary history of art. In 1986, in the Lower East Side of New York, Plexus started its art journey on board a metaphoric art slave boat. Refusing the hierarchical star system of the Artworld, 220 artists acted intentionally the selling of themselves, handcuffed together and to their artworks, directly to the art market through an art slaves auction event. It was about the survival need for the artists to create their own independent avenues. In 1988, at the House of the Slaves in the island of Goree, off Dakar, the largest slave trading centre on the African coast, and one of the first UNESCO’s world heritage sites, today under a dramatic sea erosion, the flag of the Plexus Art Slavery Manifesto was raised up as a statement against the enslavement of art as a commodity and the disengagement of the artists from the community. Against any form of slavery, the eroded Door of No Return of the House of the Slaves of Gorée became the symbol of the erosion of the memory of humankind as well as the place from where to start the repatriation of art into the community. Looking for the acknowledgement of art as an underestimated resource for an effective sustainable development, to overcome the fake concept of autonomous art by means of a more complex interdependent vision, Plexus has situated "art" in an expanded community more related to a broader heterogeneous multicultural environment. Therefore, Plexus has linked the notion of "art" to the concept of "well being" - as a paradigm enhancing the quality of life for all. From its beginning, in 1982 in New York, Plexus was conceived as an interdisciplinary project committed to the achievement of a heightened understanding of alternatives enhancing human experience. Since then, it has realized numerous experimental events, involving more than a thousand of artists and scientists around the world, mainly in New York, Dakar, Rome, Sardinia, Amsterdam, and Australia.

Plexus uses the metaphor as a multi-category framework, a crossing over between knowledge and unconsciousness. The metaphor is ultra-rapid, it works with nanoseconds (billion fractions of a second), the time-scale of our computers. One nanosecond is so fast that it exists before its rational thought. The metaphor of art can help to perceive reality beyond our rational horizon. The erosion of the Door of No Return is the Plexus metaphor for a change of route in the human use of human beings and the Ark of the WellBeing is the journey to safeguard the Door. The radical transformation of today’s scenery and the complexity of the issues raised and their interdependent components require, within the people-centered bottom-up sustainable development paradigm, not only new multicultural perspectives and transectorial models, but also creative approaches for a change of perception and consciousness. At this time, in a global world in crisis, Plexus International has outlined a sustainable art model that might prove to be invaluable to grasp possibilities of global interaction, among artists, scientists, communities and institutions. Art is a cultural product that has its historical value and this book as a catalog presents in a chronological sequence the non stop 25 years art activity of Plexus with the purpose to call for attention on the erosion of the value of history in contemporary art. Within an art environment known for the brief historical duration of its art groups and movements, the "unique quarter of century" art documentation reported in it, provides to Plexus International a historical artistic credit line and, at the same time, it challenges the notion that the artistic identification is conferred only by the ArtWorld.

Within a Plexus archive of more than 50.000 photos and hundreds videos, to deal with the methodological problem of selecting the 1157 images reported in this book catalog, I applied the phenomenological methodological approach pointed out by Alfred Schutz in Reflections on the Problem of Relevance, that I used in 1997 to complete at New York University my Ph.D. dissertation on Plexus Black Box, published in 2007 by the Sapienza University of Rome Academic Press. I am aware that many artists’ contributions are partially reported and I apologize for it, but this book catalog is only a framework in progress for the development of a collective interactive online publication, where the whole Plexus archive will be posted and all participants can fully report their art contributions (images, texts, videos). In conclusion, it is an open invitation to come on board the Ark of the WellBeing, www.plexusforum.net, to travel together to safeguard the access through the DOOR OF RETURN to all future generations.