Luara Antunes Stollmeier

This project investigates how certain visual regimes of Antarctica—those created by sealers, whalers, and early labourers—were later invisibilised by the heroic and scientific imagery that came to define the continent. It asks whether traces of these earlier visual grammars persist within the image-making practices of archaeological research groups dedicated to excavating the material remains of those same marginalised histories. Drawing from archives in Norway and contemporary visual materials from Brazil’s and Argentina’s Antarctic programs, the project develops an Archaeology of Graphic Images: an innovative, multidisciplinary methodology grounded in decolonial thought, the philosophy of photography of the Czech-Brazilian thinker Vilém Flusser, and the epistemological framework of archaeology. In this approach, images are treated as archaeological strata capable of producing models of the world to which we respond. Their analysis follows a stratigraphic logic: each photograph, drawing, or digital record reveals a layer of gesture, technology, affect, and politics sedimented in the history of Antarctic ontology. By linking Northern archives and Southern laboratories, the project rethinks how global science sees, remembers, and legitimises the Antarctic past—and how visual practices continue to shape the imagination of a continent built as much on images as on ice.