Valentine Siboni

A site-specific installation created by Valentine Siboni, the exhibition takes its starting point with the video “Antarctic Ballads.” Premiered during the 57th Venice Biennale in the widely discussed Antarctic Pavilion, the ‘ballads’ tell the poetic tale of a solitary traveller. An explorer going South: from Brussels to Venice while documenting her road trip. Siboni relates to the Pole as magnetic more than South. It is a spot that attracts our full attention to its absolute emptiness. A landscape devoid of ourselves. An alien and hostile place, where “the feeling of being nowhere and going nowhere is overwhelming.”

Antarctica resists, while Siboni filters her journey with the available lenses of literature and pop culture. Log books by Robert Falcon Scott and Jean-Baptiste Charcot, “At the Mountains of Madness” by Lovercraft, and “The Thing”, an American John Carpenter sci fi horror flick, make an eclectic theory of society’s desire to conquer. Siboni weaves those histories into monuments – territory markers and flags – symbols of identity. Her research points to a sense of survival in the act of marking places that do not want us. “The cliffs seem to say, go away!” She repeats in her work. It is the reaction of nature to humanity and its unstoppable expansion.

A sovereign continent, annexed in the name of the research elite, open to polar tourism (summers only). Antarctica is Ali Baba’s cave for the greedy of this world. Discovered a little over two hundred years ago, it has deposits of vital resources, their fate left to future global conflicts. The Antarctic project is an expedition in process with many unawares. Its location is a beacon for the Modern world’s need to divide. A simple system of binaries. The South to the North, Venus to Mars, a woman to a man, one country to nation. We colonise every second, with a shake of our head, our sight, a word. This is how we, everyone of us, creates symbolic geography – an instrument of domination.