Antarctica Reframed: Material Histories and Genealogies of Human Presence

Ziel

Why is Antarctica still imagined as a pristine, timeless, and uninhabited continent—despite over two centuries of human presence? This question is rarely posed. The enduring imaginary of Antarctica as an untouched wilderness has silenced even the possibility of asking what humanity has done there. Yet this silence matters urgently today. In the context of the global climate crisis, Antarctica is invoked as a model of sustainability, a unique experiment in international governance, and even a prototype for extraplanetary colonisation. More fundamentally, there has been no critical and sustained examination of what the expansion of humanity into Antarctica has entailed, nor of what it means for the global history of human presence on Earth.
AWAY seeks to break this silence by offering the first continent-wide, materially grounded study of human presence in Antarctica. The project starts from the premise that things are active agents, they have not merely enabled presence; they have configured it. AWAY will investigate how human presence in Antarctica has been materially configured, remembered, and projected across time. To achieve this, the project develops a threefold analytical structure: Inhabiting, which examines the material configuration of presence; Remembering, which analyses how Antarctic pasts have been framed, erased, or classified; and Prototyping, which studies experimental and imagined futures of inhabitation. Together, these perspectives will establish a new archaeological framework that redefines Antarctica as a key site for understanding the contemporary world.