Andrea Juan. Antarctica Project III, Methane

Argentine visual artist Andrea Juan received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2005 to develop Antarctica Project. Juan traveled to Antarctica four times where she recorded images and sounds of the terrain, images projected onto glacial walls, and performances on ice shelves during storms. From this she created a multi-media body of work consisting of photography, video, sound and performance art. Antarctica Project III, Methane, produced during Juan’s third trip to the snow-covered plateau of Marambio reveals the miasma, inaccessibility and desolation of this frozen geography whose surface is slowly eroding due to toxic gases. She learned from resident scientists about the effects of climate change on ice shelves and the appearance of methane gas emerging as a result of melting glaciers and increasing greenhouse gases. She studied research on how the Poles are integral components of the Earth’s ecosystem that respond to and drive environmental changes elsewhere on the planet.

Andrea Juan’s aesthetic response to her explorations conveys an emotional connection between the intangible and the scientific. In the performance works, the actors grasp long trains of vividly colored red and blue tulles propelled by violent wind along the frozen white landscape evoking the metaphors of a wounded Antarctica, and entwined in it, of nature and humanity bound by destructive forces.

Through Juan’s art the viewer encounters Antarctica as a modern day place of pilgrimage where one can go to engage with its magnificence, vastness and relentless wildness, to connect spiritually with the power of nature. The work draws upon the realm of ecological wisdom of indigenous and tribal cultures who live close to the land and link humanity with a value system of ancient origin that holds nature as sacred.

Andrea Juan
Antarctica Project III, Methane
Kuratorin: Nina Colosi