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methane

Science

Andrea Juan Methane Primera Bienal del Fin del Mundo, Ushuaia, 2007

Different performances which are part of METANO [methane] were carried out on the snowed plateau of Marambio. Fog, inaccessibility, the lonliness of that frozen geography slowly invaded by the fluoescent emanations of toxic gasses which desperately flow into its surface. The unexpected, even to the last breath; an effort on man's side to result uninjured in those struggles.

Andrea Juan Buenos Aires 2005

Gestures made in response to Antarctica are ways to connect with its changes.

Artistic engagements with Antarctica through various media, methods and metaphors, reveal changes witnessed, experienced and understood there. Scientists tell of a landscape on the move. Hearing their words, artists bring to life their new understandings in the context of their own arts practice and experience.

Argentinian artist Andrea Juan went to Antarctica in the summer of 2005. On her way there she listened to voices of scientists explaining the landscape changes. Media she took to work with included enormous swathes of rainbow coloured tulle, cameras, data projectors, video footage of Argentinian sunflowers, and her own body. Methods she employed to engage these in the landscape included dancing with tulle through wind, drawing it over rock, and projecting moving images of colourful sunflowers onto ice. (Sur Polar, 2008).

Physically drawing colours into the predominantly white space, through human movement and video projection, animates connections between known and unknown landscapes. Metaphors embodied in her materials and methods include tension between the heat of teeming life and cold white death, and the toxic intrusions of humans in a pristine environment. Sunflowers burning in fire represent our burning of fossil fuels which changes all our landscapes through "loss of matter."

The flower centers filled up with seeds intensify the dramatic effect of rapidly passing images which transform their destiny until they burn out in the flames of a fire which, beyond the fascination it rouses in the recipient, acts as a warning. The layers of transparent material on which the video is shown in the hall [Videoinstallation Contemporaneo 13, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), 2005] further the idea of the loss of matter and thus the fate of the art is equaled to that of Antarctica.

Corinne Sacca Abadi The Tragic Beauty of a Changing Horizon, Catalogue, Andrea Juan: proyecto antartida Pub. Direcciion Nacional del Antartico, El Fondo Nacional de las Artes, El Programa Antartico Argentino, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York, 2005, p. 85

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