Art as the perceptual infrastructure of Antarctic governance

Artist, polar researcher and Antarctic rights working group member Jean de Pomereu once suggested that Antarctica should be protected for peace, science and art. I laughed. The world, on good days, half agrees on the first two. Art sounds like an indulgence. Then the idea weathered three months of neglect.

The puzzle, I think, is that societies rarely act on information alone. Between knowing and doing lies a large and unexamined space: perception. Law, science and diplomacy are instruments of reason; but what moves people, what enables action, is not always reason. It is what becomes real to them.

Legislative art

Here, Daniela Ortiz’s legislative art is instructive. She sits on stage, reading a statement while receiving a blood transfusion from a Spanish citizen. The scene is part press conference, part protest. As blood crosses between bodies, Ortiz speaks of her own legal exclusion: nine years in Spain, pregnant, however neither she nor her child will qualify for Spanish or EU citizenship. Spain’s Jus sanguinis or the “right of blood” means that she and her child will always be caught in what she considers an exclusionary colonial and racial legal overhang. Ortiz’s performance compresses a dispersed harm into an inspectable event. The audience does not have to infer injustice; it witnesses it.

So what does that have to do with Antarctica?

De Pomereu’s intuition is that much of the continent’s representation is either anaemic or overcharged. The images we rely on are either endless white or turquoise blue. They vacillate between empty voids and towering icebergs, megafauna and fluffy penguins, ascetic endurance and luxury travel. Either way, they are starved of moral perception. They feed a fascination with scale but not with consequence. The argument is that art has the potential to make peace and science perceptible at each instance or make a dispersed harm perceptible. Both literally and metaphorically.

In his Polar Record article “All but Blank: Artistic approaches to human Antarctica”, De Pomereu notes that post-International Geophysical Year, art in Antarctica increasingly turned from romantic sublimity to social and political interrogation. The most incisive of these, he argues, reject the myth of a pure, ahuman continent and show “Antarctica as socially and politically constructed as any other region of the Earth”. Among these artists, Julius von Bismarck’s Raumfisch (Space Fish) (2017) stands out:

“He brought with him a miniature remotely operated submarine comprising a hermetic glass bowl […] filled with heated freshwater and inhabited by a tropical freshwater fish. The submarine was lowered into the frigid Antarctic waters and the tropical fish ‘visited’ a new world without ever coming into direct contact with it.”

Raumfisch also performs the paradox of contemporary governance, the desire to inhabit and protect simultaneously. It is in this light that De Pomereu wonders whether “it might be desirable for humans to be placed in a glass bowl when venturing south of 60° S”.

The CCAMLR installation

In 2025, the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (“CCAMLR”) failed again to adopt new marine protected areas (MPAs) and even let a key krill-distribution rule lapse; simultaneously, the fleet set record catches in 2023/24–2025, concentrating effort along predator foraging corridors on the Antarctic Peninsula.

Now, imagine walking into a conference hall during the CCAMLR meetings. The floor itself is an active map of the Southern Ocean. Tiny points of light show where krill fishing vessels are moving in real time, using their satellite (AIS) data. Across the same map, glowing arcs represent the feeding zones of whales and penguins, drawn from the tracking collars and bio-logging tags that scientists deploy each season. When a vessel’s path crosses one of these feeding zones, the lights dim slightly and a low sound echoes through the room: recorded calls of the species affected. A mechanical counter ticks downwards, translating the catch into calories lost from the ecosystem. This installation would give policymakers a sensory understanding of the trade-offs they negotiate, helping them perceive the real-time consequences of the decision before them.

Pre-legislative change

Diplomats and delegates arrive at the CCAMLR or Antarctic Treaty consultative meeting with fixed instructions, “oppose new MPAs, protect fishing rights, maintain scientific cooperation”. These are immovable at the level of national and international policy. But mandates only prescribe what to defend, not how to feel about it. 

This pre-legislative art would inform the terrain on which the mandate is defended. The delegate still votes the same way, perhaps. But they now know they are voting inside a darkened room where whale calls fade as vessels cross feeding grounds. Even if it does not flip a vote, it can change the credibility of later justifications or the language used in side conversations. That is slow, pre-legislative change: not persuasion in the traditional sense, but reconditioning perception so that when a window of political flexibility opens, the imagination is already prepared.

Art in this sense could enable cognitive justice. Modern governance privileges certain ways of knowing, scientific, bureaucratic or juridical, while excluding others. It produces what field lawyer César Rodríguez-Garavito calls epistemic monocultures, where facts are visible only through the lenses of technocracy. The crisis of the Anthropocene and particularly the paralysis of Antarctic governance, is not only institutional but epistemic.  

We have too few ways to perceive interdependence. Cognitive justice demands that the world be seen through multiple ontologies and sensibilities, not only through data but through the felt presence of loss, connection and figuration. Legislative art, in this sense, becomes a tool of ecological constitutionalism, by intervening in the law’s perceptual infrastructure, which allows societies to see the consequences they legislate for. The installation imagined for the CCAMLR meetings would not prescribe policy but would make collective life perceivable as shared vulnerability.

The idea here is that transformation begins not with a change of rules but with a change of vision. The purpose of such interventions is not to substitute reason for emotion but to democratise perception. Policy, at its logical conclusion, is formalised perception. Every intervention, every clause, every line of a budget is an act of selective attention. What we cannot feel, we cannot legislate for. What we cannot sense, we will not account for. Art does not in and of itself make law or policy, but it can widen its aperture. And perhaps that is what De Pomereu meant, that the future of Antarctic protection depends not only on peace and science but on restoring the human capacity to reduce peace and science into single, inspectable events. DM