Himali Singh Soin on a unique Antarctica post office

I went to the Antarctic and the Arctic in 2017. So, there I am in the Antarctic, far away from everything else that I’ve ever known in the world, and I come across the post office that’s called Port Lockroy, where two women live, and they can’t leave for about six months at a time. It’s on the coast. The sky was perfectly blue. And the windows of this building have, are kind of painted red, the frames are painted red. And there’s these white streaks on this black building, and so there was also this kind of British flag that had shown up, just in terms of the colors. And it is the you know, it is the British Antarctic Survey that is housed there. You know, I of course, as a brown woman in the Antarctic and in the Arctic had begun to question very much, like, the history of colonization in these places, and then how I, as this brown woman, was kind of reflected in this landscape that was obviously, partially white, but in many places brown because of the receding glaciers. And then, in the back there were these rooms where the men of, I think, the expeditions from the eighties and the seventies would have slept. And there were these paintings of, like, women with giant boobs and, you know, like beer mugs, and things like that. So, it was this, kind of, totally bizarre, isolated, suspended drama in the middle of total whiteness and many penguins. So, I sent a few postcards out. And I wrote completely absurd things like “What is the sublime when you are in a place like this?” “This is the closest I’ll ever come to the moon.” “I love you always.” You know, like, these big grand, kind of, gestures, and I sent it off. And recently, a friend just sent me a picture of that postcard, and it was dated 21st November, 2017. But I had gone to Antarctica at the end of February 2017. So, like any kind of birthing process I felt like I was almost giving birth to a universe, a mini universe, by sending that letter out.