| Abstract: | Andrea Juan has responded to climate change in her art since 2002, highlighting the potential enjoyment of uncertainty and the pleasure of discovering this ecological crisis. Through an examination of El bosque invisible: Serie Antártica The Invisible Forest: The Antarctica Series], 2010, this article will examine how Juan represents environmental transformations through her process, aesthetic choices, and work in Antarctica. Antarctica—an emblem of environmental change and advancements in scientific research—serves as one of the main stages for Juan's placement of colorful fabrics and cloth figures that are meant to represent specific natural phenomena connected to climate change. Juan's documentation of these scenes in videos and digital stills quotes the Romantic tradition of the sublime in landscape painting, the artist-traveller, and a heroic notion of scientific fieldwork, which exposes a continued desire for control despite our increasing knowledge of our limitations, as well as two principal means through which we understand climate change: science and the sublime. Furthermore, the pleasing quality of Juan's art, in spite of the crisis to which she alludes, aligns with contemporary trends that favor participation, pleasure and hope. This tendency itself exposes the uncertainty of art's role in the face of such crises. |
