The photos and videos on view are the result of a two-year process in which Mireya Masó has been working on the visual material she compiled during her time spent in Antarctica in early 2006, in close collaboration with the marine ecologist Mercedes Masó.

Over a two month period on the Esperanza scientific-military base, coinciding with the end of the summer, she was able to observe and register the fast pace of change taking place on a daily basis in the Antarctica.

The Antarctica is the visible presence of change. Time measured by the clock is materialised in a seamless passage of sunlight and clouds, calm, snow and rubble blown by the wind, the tides, the to-and-fro of icecaps across the bay. It is a landscape in motion, nothing stays the same for more than one instant. Here in the Antarctica every single second has the value of the present. It appears and disappears before it can be recorded.

Lasting over three weeks, the second phase on board the Iritzar icebreaker belonging to the Argentinean navy (on a research and logistics mission in Antarctica) was a more paused experience. As the boat was unable to drop anchor, it moved almost as slowly as the icebergs that surrounded it, stopping frequently to undertake technical operations on various existing bases.

Rather than focussing on spectacular moments, her goal was to transcribe the complexity we are able to register as human sensors, carefully observing things and concentrating attention on the subtle changes in the system, on the very limits of what we can perceive and archive in the memory, in order to translate this singular experience into images, insofar as possible.

While the time scale is at the core of many of the ten videos created up until the moment, addressing the limits of human perception, in the series of small format photographs this meditation on time is again expressed in the relationship of each one of them with the whole. This series is, together with the video installation Experiment No. 1 which was presented at Casa América, one of the works made jointly. The apparent asepsis and distancing proportioned by Mercedes Masó’s scientific focus is undercut by a fully shared authorship in which both players take on identical roles. (Scenographic lighting + perception of distance.)

The perception of distance is foreclosed: objects on other distant latitudes take on an almost tactile proximity that cuts through our unprotected pupils. Whiteness is unfolded in a multicolour spectrum tinged with infinite nuances, caressing the forms of millenarian accumulations. The gaze hypnotised by the tiny detail cannot embrace everything. In the blink of an eye new subtle changes happen that transform the scene into something always new.

The Antarctica is the last continent to be added to our mapped world. It remits us to the purity of another time, to the pure presence in each instant of things shifted by the movement of infinite transformation and tangentially lit by a shared focus. The Antarctica is perhaps the best experience to connect with the pure passing of life. An unprotected classical beauty that has had to take refuge there where man is not yet the lord and master.

Base Esperanza: Registro de variabilidad comprises a total of 29 photographs exploring the daily phenomena transforming the bay, ranging from the displacement of floes of ice, to the greenish colouring of the water due to flowering seaweed.

In Cuaderno de Campo, a series of 21 photographs, the Antarctic landscape and fauna is confronted with the human presence, with images of penguins near the Esperanza base and the ice floes seen from the deck of the Iritzar icebreaker.

The eight photographs in the series Icebergs Types borrows its inspiration from scientific models for cataloguing icebergs according to their origin and their shapes as a result of erosion.

Some works from the Antarctica series have been seen before in exhibitions such as: 2008: Museo de Teruel, Teruel. Paraísos Indómitos, Marco Fundación, Vigo. Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo. Sur Polar. Muntref, Buenos Aires. Lingüísticas de la imagen, Casa Asia, CIGE, Pekín, CN. 2007: Idilio, Domus Artium 2 (DA2), Salamanca. Cool Stories for When the Planet Gets Hot, Scope Basel, Basel. Upsouth Down, Black Box, Arco 07, Madrid. 2006: Naturaleza: Experiencia, Palacio del Cardenal Lorenzana, Toledo. Nunatak. Polvorín-Ciudadela, Pamplona. Antártida. Experimento nº1, Casa de América, Madrid.