A very wide view

I’ve been thinking and writing lately about environments of different scales and temporalities, but I hadn’t thought beyond the confines of our planet and its atmosphere. Should I be looking farther out, to the whole cosmos? Lita Albuquerque is.

At a talk that was part of the University of California/Berkeley Extension’s Art of Sustainability series, Albuquerque–described as a pioneering member of the first generation of Earth artists–spoke about the large-scale art she has been creating for decades and about her current project, Stellar Axis: Antarctica.

Stellar Axis:Antarctica (Photo by Jean de Pomereu)

Albuquerque described herself as interested in “a different kind of ecology…a greater connection to the cosmos, the interrelatedness of earth to the sky and the stars.” Stellar Axis grew out of Albuquerque’s long-time vision of linking the stars above the South Pole to the stars above the North Pole by columns of light through the earth. She spent many years working with astronomers to plot the positions of the stars above each pole and how they would align at a specific point in time, and planned an installation in each location.

In 1996 Albuquerque was invited by the National Science Foundation’s Artists and Writers Program to create the first part of her installation. She was not permitted to go to the exact geographical South Pole, but worked on the Ross Ice Shelf near McMurdo Station. On December 11,2006, she and her five-person team–an astronomer, three photographers, and a filmaker–began preparing the vast space that would be the base of the installation. They then placed 99 blue spheres ranging from 10 inches to 4 feet in diameter into a pattern that would correspond to the position of the stars above that exact spot on the Southern Hemisphere’s summer solstice, December 22.

Placing the Stars (Photo by Jean de Pomereu)

On the day of the solstice, Albuquerque directed volunteers from the research station in a performance, spiraling through the installation in a star map that mirrored the sky above.

Walking the Star Map (Photo by Jean de Pomereu)

Albuquerque’s website includes a fascinating video of her thinking that informed the project as well as some of the work that went into creating it. The final installation and performance were filmed from a helicopter, and Albuquerque is currently working on making the film into whole-room projections, with added soundscapes, that will travel the world.

Stellar Axis:Antarctica is Phase I of a two-part project that will trace the alignment of the stars above both poles. Albuquerque sees this as “a picture not just of a planet floating in space, but a planet surrounded by a vast circulatory system of stars of which we are a part.. . . It is about our place in the cosmos, and our need to do something about our place.” A very wide view indeed, and truly spectacular.

However, I think it’s fair to ask whether this very wide view ignores the consequences of such projects on the narrower space where it takes place. Antarctica is an extremely fragile environment; what will be the impact on it of this disruption? My question was not entirely answered, but I was pleased to hear Albuquerque say that she and her team followed extremely strict requirements for how to behave while they were on site and, when they left, they took with them every piece of material that they had brought in. Working in the earth’s most extreme environment, she explained, she became acutely aware of the ecology of Antarctica and of her footprint, not only there but everywhere–what she called “the ecology of understanding your responsibility for everything you do–the connection of everyone to everyone and everything else for survival.”