At Nauti Studios we love all things creative and all things sustainability. We especially love creative projects addressing environmental and sustainability issues.

Nauti Sailor Sabrina spoke to artist Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger about their exhibition Antarctica: All to Lose now showing at the Chrissie Cotter Gallery. For the past decade Kannar-Lichtenberger has completed research residencies in remote places including the Galapagos Islands, Faroe Islands and Deception Island in Antarctica. Antarctica: All to Lose presents works developed during a 2017 residency at Deception Island. Read all about it here.

Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger, *Elemental Obsolescence,* 2018, pigment print on archival photo paper, 80 x 120cm

There Is No Hope, Except For Us

Antarctica: All to Lose by Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger

For the past decade artist Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger has completed research residencies in remote places including the Galapagos Islands, Faroe Islands and Deception Island in Antarctica. Now showing at the Chrissie Cotter Gallery Antarctica: All to Lose presents works developed during a 2017 residency at Deception Island. It examines the bleak impact of tourism on fragile environments and its link to the legacy of colonial exploration. For many, Anatartica will remain remote, seen only through the lens of a camera, and as Kannar-Lichtenberger told me Antarctica: All to Lose proposes that perhaps it should remain that way.

““We want to go see that leopard or lion, and we will damage what we can to get there, to get that photograph. I think that the photograph is becoming the double-edged sword. It’s one way to archive but it’s also becoming the problem. [...] These works are about the archiving of an item, of an object, of a space, of a place. Is that the answer? Do we just archive it? We’re archiving seeds, we’re archiving species, does that mean those things have a future? Or are we only preserving for our own gratification?” ”

— Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger

Antarctica: All to Lose evokes the now canonic words from Roland Barthes’ 1980 text Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Here he says “what the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.” The exhibition opens with Livingston I Presume II (2023) an arctic landscape seen through the lens of a telescope. As Kannar-Lichtenberger told me: “if you were an explorer, this is how you’d first come across a new land”. Here we see a reimagined Antarctica, seemingly unscathed by Western culture, before the effects of industrialisation. What Livingston I Presume II reproduces to infinity is an untouched Antarctica, an Antarctica that has already been lost.

Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger, *Prozaic, 2023,* archival pigment print on Ilford galerie smooth pearl, 35 x 45cm

This is followed by a series of photographs that document Deception Island today. We see whale bones scattered upon volcanic black sand, an abandoned 20th century boat and relics of industrialisation litter the landscape. These are the first of many ‘memento moris’ to be found here. In Unhappy Feet I & II (2018) we see remnants of the corpse of a penguin imprinted in plastic. Upon ingesting a net that held fish, this penguin was mummified from the inside out. This work documents the grim fossil etched into plastic, the fatal moment frozen in time. Easily mistaken for a precious stone or ancient artefact, this memento mori speaks in the language of museology and its inception in colonial exploration. Its green and blue hues are reminiscent of faience, a ground quartz used by the ancient Egyptians. Unhappy Feet I & II asks, are these our future relics? Will these become rare objects held in museums, or so commonplace they litter our beaches? One thing is certain, plastic is an inevitable part of the legacy of the Anthropocene.

Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger, *Unhappy Feet I & II, 2018,* deep etched pigment print on archival photographic paper, 200 x 110cm

In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography Bathes says:

““For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood. ””

For me, the noise of Time is an alarm. In Dissipation_II (2023) a ghostly image of Antarctica is shown on voile, a sheer fabric fraying at the edges. This work asks, has the unravelling just begun? Or is this the moment of no return, as it all becomes undone? It conjures the ancient Fates of Greek mythology, who were personified as three women spinning the threads of human destiny. Yet there is an inherent materiality to Kannar-Lichtenberger work, here the medium is the message. Like a memento mori these traces are material, shockingly tangible and painfully real.

I asked Kannar-Lichtenberger whether we still have all to lose, or whether it is already lost. In response, she shared a quote from Jonathan Franzen’s 2019 essay What If We Stopped Pretending? In it he says:

“There is infinite hope,” Franzen tells us, “only not for us.” This is a fittingly mystical epigram from a writer whose characters strive for ostensibly reachable goals and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to get any closer to them. But it seems to me, in our rapidly darkening world, that the converse of Kafka’s quip is equally true: “There is no hope, except for us.””

Here I recall that the memento mori acts as a reminder. That this present moment of crisis may only happen once, but perhaps more significantly, the moment for action may only happen once. This threshold, or new frontier, this fleeting opportunity for a correction to shift our legacy, may only occur once. There really is no hope, except for us.

Antarctica: All to Lose is showing at Chrissie Cotter Gallery until 8th October 2023
Artist talk: Saturday 7th & Sunday 8th of October from 12pm – 3pm

Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger during her 2017 expedition to Antarctica for her research on small islands and isolated places, the inspiration behind her exhibition ‘Antarctica: All to Lose’.

For more information on Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger
Instagram: @leakannarlichtenberger
Website: leakannar.com

This article was written by Nauti Sailor Sabrina Sokalik, at Nauti Studios Sydney.
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