ATLAS DE UN CONTINENTE QUE NO EXISTE: Santiago Vélez

His research project by Artist Santiago Vélez, was born in early 2020, together with a group of oceanographers, glaciologists, geologists, physicists, engineers and an artist, they explored Antarctica to create the "Atlas of a continent that does not exist". Thanks to the support of the Ministry of Culture, the Travel Foundation and the Sofía Pérez de Soto Foundation, the research project "Atlas of a continent that does not exist" began its research phase between January and February 2020 in Antarctica, as part of the Colombian Project of Art in Antarctica PCAA that belongs to the Colombian Antarctic Program and that was carried out at the Pedro Vicente Maldonado Scientific Base in Ecuador on Greenwich Island, in the South Shetlands Islands. When looking for maps of the world in any Internet search engine, it is common to find that, in most of them, the Antarctic continent is deliberately omitted; Likewise, since basic education, we have always been told about five continents and not six, excluding it due to its particular conditions. Being an area dedicated to science and peace, which does not have borders delimiting states, it is a continent that does not “contain” countries. In addition, its permanent spatial and volumetric variation by increasing its size to double in winter and reducing it in summer, plus the adversities of the climate and the territory, make it a territory yet to be discovered, full of gaps in its cartography and with great mysteries to discover. The science. With all these premises, Santiago Vélez sets off towards the utopia of creating an atlas of what does not seem to exist: a geography hidden under layers of thousand-year-old snow that hide not only the topography of the land, but also the memory of the origins of what what are we.