Antarctica is a womb that gestates the balance of the planet.

It is also a device of time.
Each drop of glacier is a unit of lifetime
and an eternity dissolving away.

Imagination may be the opposite of time
and perhaps the only possible nation.

The site-specific installation One by One, the Rocks Melted speaks of a temporality marked by temperature, of imagination as a tool for relating to that which remains inaccessible, and of a working methodology that attempts not to be extractivist, yet, in contact with the fragility and specificity of the territory, inevitably reveals its own paradoxes.

As paradoxical as the idea of nation within imagination, or as human presence itself in a continent that constantly challenges such presence, while at the same time, through the frameworks of science and art, sustains the Antarctic Treaty and at least partially suspends extractivist and colonizing dynamics.

Within this context, the installation proposes a material friction. Ice forms imagi and stones form nation, both elements sourced from the immediate environment.
As the ice melts, the stones are removed one by one. The nation disappears. Imagination emerges as a relational and possibly anti-extractivist tool. Can we also imagine a mineral sovereignty?

Drone documentation: Oleg Vassilev
Video documentation: Ernesto Bautista
Video editing: Juan Pablo García Sossa and Daniela Medina Poch

Special thanks to the staff of St. Kliment Ohridski Base, to Ernesto, the iceberg, the ocean, and the rocks.

Realized within the framework of the Colombian Antarctic Art Project, the 12th Colombian Expedition to Antarctica, and the Colombian Antarctic Program, in collaboration with the 38th Bulgarian Antarctic Expedition.