Background

Mapping Antarctica

First charted from ships of the early explorers, the changing shape of Antarctica is now mapped from above by satellites.

Rhythms of past global climate changes are read from ice cores drilled from Antarctic glaciers to help us map our future.

But how is Antartcica mapped by the people who have experience it?

These pages welcome contributions to help map Antarctica.

Philippe Boissonnet, Lorraine Beaulieuand Pamen Periera have each mapped Antarctica in ways that suggest no line exists between our selves and the natural world.

Philippe Boissonnet Lorraine Beaulieu Pamen Periera

Pamen Periera, Spanish
Vistas isometricas del continente, Dibujos de humo impressos sobre tela, 2006

Pamen Pereira's maps describe emotions. Drawn from her three days alone in a small hut on an Antarctic glacier, they map the internal and external landscapes she experienced: extremes of dark and light, highs and lows.

Depicting the continent from two perspectives simultaneously - from the east and from the west, further suggests there is more than one way of knowing Antarctica.

Antarctica, the artist says, is a place that lends itself to us knowing...

...(its) relationship with the mysterious forces of Nature and the subtle energies connected with consciousness...

In relation to the Antarctic Continent the objective was to interpret the interior shape of a landscape that shows opposites simultaneously - void and plenitude, finite and infinite, freezing and boiling, visible and invisible, light and darkness. To reach its internal structure and to understand the relationship between the immanence and transcendence of the consciousness through matter and its divine resonance.

I have now verified that the core of the Earth beats loudly under the overwhelming white coat, that the frozen mountains and the ice floes of my sculptures and pictures exist, that the Moon also travels over those seas and that the glaciers are poets of light and air. Poetry in its essence. It's an ideal place that accompanies the ice burning in our inside, which some times purifies us and some times consumes us.

Pamen Periera, Buenos Aires, March 2008