Eclipse (Antarctica, December 4, 2021)

Janet Biggs, 2022 - 2024
Single channel HD video with spatial sound
Running time 6:51

Biggs’ most recent work Eclipse (Antarctica, December 4, 2021), (2022) is based on her December 2021 trip to the Chilean coast of Antarctica to view a rare total solar eclipse. Enveloped in dense layers of fog, Biggs and her shipmates confront something quite different from their expectations—an element of serendipity that provided her with an entirely new—and decidedly different—narrative. In Eclipse Biggs interweaves footage from her voyage—in which the entire purpose of the trip is subverted by the dense fog—with those of navigational methods used throughout time to identify one’s place in the world and poetic texts drawn from myriad sources including her personal memories of her mother’s struggles with the Sundowner Syndrome she suffered within her Alzheimer’s Disease; accounts by the Yakut people of Eastern Siberia on local weather conditions, the writings of Lt. James Melville Gillis, An Account of the Total Eclipse of the Sun, Published by Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 1859, and psychological studies of people in extreme isolation. The overt line of inquiry in Eclipse is the demanding, physical, and adventurous voyage; the subtext is introspection, and the meaning of the various ways in which the word ‘eclipse’ can function: light blocked; identity obscured; significance, power, and prominence deprived. - Terrie Sultan