Antartic Museum

“Antarctic Museum” brings together a collection of documents and artifacts from the César A. Lisignoli Antarctic Museum in the city of Villa María, Argentina.

“Antarctic Museum” brings together a collection of documents and artifacts from the César A. Lisignoli Antarctic Museum in the city of Villa María, Argentina. This evocative space was founded by its namesake in 1981 in order to raise awareness about the preservation of the Antarctic and the study of glaciers, a science that has become the basis on which to measure global warming. The original museum sought to bring the distant closer to an ordinary landscape and, in so doing, to integrate the extreme geography of the south into the national territory in a context that was even more sterile than the icy region it portrayed—the context of the military dictatorship and the imminent Falklands War. The artist’s “Antarctic Museum” relocates fragments, places, birds, archives, even legal evidence from a lawsuit , all of which send back another vision of the museum—that of the museum as montage and fiction. Lisignoli’s Antarctic Museum and Goymil’s “Antarctic Museum” mirror and reflect each other, anchor and move each other in a circular dance, sustain this fragile and unbounded world as it becomes extinct and disappears. As it calls to us through the desolation of its snowy, cold, windy whiteness.

Mariana Robles