Antarctic Thought Experiment (2021)
Dialogues with academics who have never visited their object of study, Antarctica, inform 'translations' from Antarctic metaphors into art objects and performance on video. The resulting dream-like visuals combine crafts familiar to early antarctic explorers, and sci-fi horror filmmaking techniques, to explore how cultural projection onto places and their histories can mask understanding, and appear entangled with colonial processes.
This work was shown at the Dutch Polar Symposium, The Hague in 2022.
Antarctic Thought Experiment departs from initial dialogues with academics who have never visited their object of study – Antarctica. Alexander Stevenson interrogates popular imaginaries of Antarctic ‘culture’: explorer journals, horror movies, nature documentaries and other human observations.
Stevenson’s knitted props, costumes and sets have an allegorical relationship to colonial fantasies which obscure and entangle Antarctica. A white western explorer figure who appears at the outset undergoes subsequent mutations in form and colour. Sticky white masking fluid and dirty grey wool contrast with livid red ocean and ice. They switch places repeatedly, so that eventually it is unclear which aspect is describing Antarctica and which is obscuring it.