The enactment of Western-European, male power and violence present in the projected historical images exposes anthropocentric logics that the performance questions: Characteristic images of industrial whaling, scientific field work, conquests, machines, maps or male explorers are deprived of their exact contours by re-rendering those images through artificially created distortions (ice / glass) and spatial displacement (projection on glacier geotextiles). 

The live-sound by collaborating artists Vivian Wang and Serafin Aebli depends on contact microphones atteched to the 16mm-projectors, synthesisers, modified electronic instruments, software and original sounds from the Janis Polars own Antartic expedition. The resulting soundscapes progress slowly in space and time, countering in their own way ever violent modernistic core values of ‹bigger, faster, stronger, further…› that are represented and staged in the images, its montage and their historical context. Furthermore, the digitally alternated sounds from the contact microphone engage in a dialogue between different machines present in the room of the performance as well as in the images, reflecting on conditions that enabled currently disturbed socio-ecologies.

Today antarctic territory is only regulated by semi-binding treaties: What will potentially happen at a later point of climate change to the land underneath Antartica once the ephemeral ice sheets are gone or even mined through? «stories-of-90°-S-empir[e]icism» oscillates between the gates of the then and now, immediacy and ephemerality.