Sculptor makes perishable art in Antarctica
From Deborah Zabarenko

Antarctica—Artists see the world differently. Maybe that’s why sculptor Lita Albuquerque decided to craft an environmental work near this icy outpost meant to be in full bloom for just one day.
Her “Stellar Axis,” on a site about 600 feet in diameter, consists of 99 blue fiberglass spheres of varying sizes in a pattern mirroring the paths of stars at the austral summer solstice. Since the sun shines around the clock here at this time of year, no stars will be visible, but their courses were plotted by astronomer Simon Balm, who also worked on the project. All the spheres will be in place only on December 22 and must be removed after that.
Among other reasons, the Antarctic Conservation Act prohibits pollution of the continent.
The work’s creation is being photographed day by day and the completed piece will be photographed from a helicopter. Its dismantling will be recorded, until there is nothing left but the blank white snow field the artist started with.
Albuquerque has done massive ephemeral works before — at the pyramids in Giza and at the Washington Monument — but the genesis of this one was a vision, she said in an interview.
“I had a image of the entire planet with the pyramids aligned to the stars,” she said. “So out of that it just came to me. The idea was to trace the stars on the solstice both at the North Pole and the South Pole.” That evolved into a project at the South Pole alone, funded through the National Science Foundation’s program for artists and writers. Albuquerque’s work’s implementation had to be brutally practical to withstand the harsh Antarctic environment.
First, she and her team had to make the spheres and test them in a wind tunnel to make sure they could survive the 110 mile per hour (177 km/h) winds they were likely to encounter. Once the spheres and the artistic team got to Antarctica, Albuquerque and the others immediately enrolled in snow school, an overnight academy that prepares workers to cope with conditions on the ice.
Albuquerque, born in Tunisia and looking every bit the elegant artist, proudly told how she dug a trench in the ice and slept in it, and learned how to drive a vehicle with metal tank tracks known as a Pisten Bully. “I’m driving a Pisten Bully and I’m driving a Ski-Doo!” she said. “And it’s so great! I love it, I love it, I love being able to do that.”
A Pisten Bully is reliable, but its speed limit here is 5 mph (8 km/h), so the 12-mile (19-km) trip over the sea ice to the art site took hours for each delivery. A Ski-Doo zipped there at 35 mph (56 km/h), but could not carry cargo. One struggle was keeping the sphere in position on the ice, Albuquerque explained. Her team considered attaching them to posts inserted deep into the ice, but that was insufficient.
“We have to dead-man them,” she said, referring to a process involving under-ice tethers with rope and bamboo attached at four points for each sphere. “It’s so labor-intensive, it’s unbelievable,” she said, laughing. “It looks so simple, what I do. It always looks like, oh, anybody could have done that. And it’s taken quite a few years of preparation and a lot of logistics.” The spheres range from about the size of a basketball to the size of a round cafe table, with the graduated sizes meant to correspond to the varying brightness of the stars overhead at the solstice.
On that day, with the spheres in place, performers from McMurdo Station, the biggest U.S. science base in Antarctica, will move slowly along the ice in the clockwise spiraling motion of the stars above, Albuquerque said. She said she found the severe climate an absolutely suitable place to make her art. “The reason I was drawn to Antarctica is the fact that it is an alignment and an axis and I’m really interested in how that puts one in relationship to ourselves, from our own bodies to the Earth and the whole cosmos”.