MENENE Antártica

Antarctica A fragment of the polar desert Menene Gras Balaguer Travel is a way of acquiring knowledge, and in the case of Magdalena Correa, as occurs in the careers of other artists, it is a life experience that is inseparable from the artistic practices which must be carried out during the fulfillment of a project, a formative journey marking the beginning of a process of change and transformation through the distance travelled. This act of travelling is clearly a test which the artist must undergo in order to achieve her objective, and here it consists of tackling a territory in the antipodes, where the conditions for life are those of a white desert covering 14,000,000 square kilometers, the driest place in the world, where freezing low temperatures make humidity impossible, situated at the most southerly point of the globe at what is also the symbolic end of the Earth. Of this surface, the territory of the Chilean Antarctic covers an area of 1,250,000 square kilometers, equivalent to more than 60% of the total surface area of the country and incorporating the Antarctic Peninsula, Bahía Fildes and the South Shetland Archipelago, formed by islands, islets and reefs. The thick layer of ice covering the surface of Antarctica can reach depths of over 1200 metres. The artist is Chilean, although she lives in Spain and her last three big projects have all been associated one way or another with periodic visits to her country, which she returns to at least once or twice a year to maintain family and cultural ties. It is interesting to note that in the works created at Santiago’s Museum of Modern Art, transformed into a landscape by the artist, who assumes the task of mapping the components of its neoclassical architecture (“El Museo”), and in Chilean Patagonia (“Austral”), or in the Atacama, which she linked with the Gobi Desert favouring the production of imagery that she considers too captivated by reality (“Del Gobi a Atacama”), when formulating her projects she always bases them on a territorial objective. By this I mean an occupied physical space, identifiable through its characteristics and which, without excluding the first of these, in spite of the fact that it is a symbol of the urban development of a city, takes the form of a desert. Of course, the identification of deserts with nothingness, emptiness or the beginning of the world is very common, but what interests her is the possibility of temporarily appropriating a territory in order to map the place and embark upon a thorough exploration of the space and its limits, with the aim of discovering the elements that inhabit it. That is what happened on the trip to Chilean Patagonia and in the resulting project, or on the journey to the Atacama and the Gobi, which she organised as if they were expeditions of discovery for which special provisioning would be required, although in her case the most important items were the still cameras and video equipment she would have to carry with her at all times, whatever the conditions on the ground. With this project, a cycle could be completed which would include the journeys to Patagonia, the deserts of Atacama and now Antarctica, without the artist altering her approach or renouncing her exploration of the territory. In fact, she might be considered recidivist, for this is an inexhaustible task and it would be difficult to bring a stage to a close without first going back to or separating herself from origins to which she is tied by her way of speaking or way of being. This does not mean that she has not directed her interest towards other cultures and continents and that she does not feel attracted to research in other continents such as Africa, where she has travelled and where she also created a project in Kenya. For her, however, landscapes possess the form of their inhabitants; and in their turn these are either a representation of the place or the perfect symbiosis between that which changes and that which endures. Neither one nor the other can evolve separately. Therefore, dealing with a place also involves gathering detailed information regarding all the significant elements that demand attention and producing a kind of database which differs essentially from that of a scientist or an athlete because it represents the unique approach of an artist, whose only goal is to understand that which calls their attention and which enables them to eliminate physical frontiers in order to process a discursive construction which does not aim to demonstrate or resemble reality, but rather to construct a simulation which becomes in the end another reality in itself. The artist’s interest in Chilean Antarctica is no accident, given the links she maintains with her country, as we have already mentioned, and given the interest which was aroused in her long ago in the last of the world’s continents to be discovered, the original name of which was “Terra Australis incognita”. The evocations and reminiscences which this territory held for the artist before she visited it are borne out by the experience of the journey, crossing an icy sea from Punta Arenas to Bahía Fildes in the vessel that provides the ferry service to King George Island, 900 miles farther south, where the main urban centre, Villa Las Estrellas, is located, which is the key settlement providing logistical support to the different scientific bases belonging to the different countries that coexist on the island. It is also the largest population centre in Antarctica, 60% of which is composed of military personnel, while 40% of the inhabitants are civilians, and of the province known as the Chilean Antarctic or Chilean Antarctica, which belongs to Chile’s XII Region. The first birth in Villa Las Estrellas came in 1980, and today the enclave has an aerodrome, a school, a supermarket, television and a mobile phone service. Of the one hundred scientific stations of the twenty-six countries with a presence in Antarctica, eighteen permanent scientific bases which also act as observatories for Germany, Argentina, Brazil, China, Korea, Poland, Russia, Uruguay and Peru are in Villa Las Estrellas, together with the four Chilean bases and the other fourteen seasonal bases. Villa La Estrellas, forming part of the complex of the Eduardo Frei Montalvo base, and the Sargento Cabral fort of the Argentine base Esperanza, are in fact the only two stable population centres in Antarctica. The climatic conditions and extreme temperatures during the six months of winter, which is a single long night, when temperatures can fall to -80º below zero, followed by the southern summer, from December to March, with temperatures no higher than 0º, characterise the South Pole, although global climate change particularly affects this part of the Earth, where temperature fluctuations have experienced great variations which have undoubtedly had a significant influence on the transformations witnessed in recent years. Without a doubt, the impact has not been limited to that frozen white landscape, for it has also been affecting its inhabitants and their ability to adapt to the harshest conditions, as well as animals; marine mammals, cetaceans –including killer whales, sperm whales and dolphins- or pinnipeds –penguins, leopard seals, sea lions and elephant seals- as well as crustaceans and other species of invertebrates such as giant octopus, sea spiders, rays, starfish and the birds that fly over these cold and arid landscapes; and the flora that is almost entirely composed of mosses, lichens and so-called snow algae. The conservation of biodiversity and the fight against global warming on the Antarctic continental shelf are considered priorities, for it is here that the planet’s greatest unexplored reserves are located. Danger threatens, however, as can be gathered from the changes in temperature that have been experienced and the resulting thaw in the Antarctic region. The most surprising aspect for the artist, however, has been those shapes that appear like inscriptions on the landscape, formed by the limited human presence constituted by the two main urban enclaves already mentioned. These are men, women and children who live there throughout the year and who have been successively interviewed in order to gather fragmentary accounts through which she has been able to picture the small individual life stories of the inhabitants. Recognition of the landscape and its residents has constituted an integrated experience which the artist has achieved through photography and producing corresponding records with a video camera. The result is the creation of an imaginary fragment of the polar desert which is superimposed onto the actual desert, which the artist does not concern herself with except when she is engaged in sporadically appropriating the land. The project begins with the flight from Santiago de Chile to Punta Arenas, the last city in Chile, situated in the far south of the country, where the artist boards the Chilean navy’s icebreaker Veil for a five-day voyage, plying seas of eight-metre waves in the Drake Passage, where the Pacific Ocean meets the Atlantic Ocean, as far as Bahía Fildes, where she is picked up by a helicopter and taken to Villa Las Estrellas. This journey is the subject of the video HASTA, which the artist has produced, and which ends with a record of the trip by helicopter from Bahía Fildes to the house where she would be received by a local family, and which she has dubbed in video format, under the title EN. On this trip to Antarctica, the artist has collected personal information from the inhabitants of Villa Las Estrellas, visions of landscapes at different times of the day, and the impressions produced on her retina by the light, ocean, ice flowers, the freezing of rocky reefs, white mountain ranges, the solitariness of the cold and a feeling of impotence in the face of a nature that is so powerful it cannot be dominated or changed.

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