Camp Little Hope
The Imperial TransAntarctic Expedition
THE IMPERIAL TRANSANTACTIC EXPEDITION was a collaborative community experiment conducted on a frozen lake in the middle of winter by Mary Rothlisberger, Molly Goldberg, Amber Phelps Bondaroff, and a rotating cast of visitors. As artists and friends, we challenged one another to nurture creativity and community-building in the face of extreme scarcity and physical hardship. We spent six weeks living in a site-specific homemade structure in sub-zero temperatures, using story-telling, collaborative creative work, and positive attitudes as tools that were integral to our survival. This was a project about needing one another, the power of openhearted sharing, and the transformative experience of creating dangerously. During our time on the ice, we built a warm community of neighbors that congregated at our makeshift home in the long evenings for food, friendship, and entertainment. We self-published three sketchbook/diaries that gave personal accounts of our experiences, hosted weekly workshops on a topics like mending, soup-making, celestial navigation, and song-writing, recorded and distributed an album of original music on the ice, produced a theatrical play, an outdoor ice-capades performance, and an on-ice narrative radio show. Through creative action and intentional community-building, we formed permanent and powerful relationships within an itinerant and typically ephemeral seasonal community.
The Imperial TransAntarctic Expedition
THE IMPERIAL TRANSANTACTIC EXPEDITION was a collaborative community experiment conducted on a frozen lake in the middle of winter by Mary Rothlisberger, Molly Goldberg, Amber Phelps Bondaroff, and a rotating cast of visitors. As artists and friends, we challenged one another to nurture creativity and community-building in the face of extreme scarcity and physical hardship. We spent six weeks living in a site-specific homemade structure in sub-zero temperatures, using story-telling, collaborative creative work, and positive attitudes as tools that were integral to our survival. This was a project about needing one another, the power of openhearted sharing, and the transformative experience of creating dangerously. During our time on the ice, we built a warm community of neighbors that congregated at our makeshift home in the long evenings for food, friendship, and entertainment. We self-published three sketchbook/diaries that gave personal accounts of our experiences, hosted weekly workshops on a topics like mending, soup-making, celestial navigation, and song-writing, recorded and distributed an album of original music on the ice, produced a theatrical play, an outdoor ice-capades performance, and an on-ice narrative radio show. Through creative action and intentional community-building, we formed permanent and powerful relationships within an itinerant and typically ephemeral seasonal community.