Image: Untitled # 1, 2024, 40 x 50cm C-type print © Annabel Elgar

Annabel Elgar’s series Birds Fly Low reconstructs the life of K.V.M., the owner of a box of sewing items bought at an online auction, whose photographs and keepsakes offer traces of a story. Hidden beneath a mass of threads was a pamphlet with makeshift instructions for making a spy balloon, alongside notes, blurred photographs, a defaced family portrait, and faded receipts from a store in Cromarty, Scotland. Other clues included a prescription for Thorazine, first administered in the 1950s to treat anxiety, psychosis and agoraphobia.

Elgar traced the airfield at Evanton, near Cromarty, to a launch site for Project Genetrix, a 1950s US programme gathering Cold War intelligence. Surveillance balloons, disguised as weather devices, flew over China, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, with over one hundred launched from Evanton in 1956.

Elgar could discover no further details about K.V.M. Were they housebound by illness, building a spy balloon to explore beyond the limits of home? Or an amateur enthusiast with speculative knowledge of Project Genetrix? This fragile archive of balloon-borne images may hold a clue. ‘Birds Fly Low’, its title taken from a note within the box, retells this story decades later. With images from this project previously featured in HAPAX Issue 7, Elgar now transforms the HAPAX Living Room project space into a site of fantasy and reimagining, weaving found objects and imagery into the installation.

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