Text by CLOT Magazine
Alejandra Pérez Núñez is a sound artist, hacktivist and media designer. Her work focuses on the study of Antarctica and uses sound, performance, video, installation, site-specific, Free Libre Open Source technologies and land art interventions. She is currently based in Chile, working at the Chilean Antarctic Institute and teaching at the Geology School in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Chile.
She is currently presenting Hacking Antarctica, a solo show at London Gallery West until January 28. Hacking Antarctica explores artistic responses that interrogate the chasm between humans and nature and proposes a methodology for artistic research based on hacking. The exhibition showcases artworks that challenge representations of the polar continent and embrace the concept of a site as a media that reinforces the productive character of art.
Experimental devices – ranging from bio-cultures to digital sensors – were implemented across sites in sub-polar areas, high altitudes, and extreme environments, including highly polluted areas. Used as unconventional registers, they were designed to implement forms of human and non-human discourse as a means to investigate the production of imperceptibility in the Antarctic region.
Based on a conception of hacking as an onto-epistemological method – in the sense that ways of knowing are altered by ways of being – the hacks presented in the exhibition involve some of these field works and site-specific performances. The work presented aims to contribute to the displacement of dominant forms of human ‘truth’ in which the imperceptibility of the non-human is remaindered as inaccessible and insignificant.
On Monday, January 21, the artist will present her work with a talk from 5-6 pm.
