Every year, ESA selects a medical doctor to spend 12 months at Concordia research station in Antarctica, conducting biomedical research to support future space exploration. In November 2024, Nina Purvis joined DC21, the station’s twenty-first winter crew, to endure the extreme isolation and freezing conditions.
Recently, the DC21 crew won a prize in the Antarctica film festival with a video about their life in the Concordia base. Below is a transcript of their video, and some images taken by the crew throughout the months they have spent so far in this outpost more remote than even the International Space Station.
“We came here to study science, but what we found was silence. A silence that breathes and watches and holds us.
Here, even water is not a gift; it is a conquest. Each drop flows because fingers listen to pipes and persuade them to flow again.
Inside these walls, the human body is both subject and mystery. Signals and cells tell us how life endures where it should not exist. The station itself becomes a laboratory of survival.
Between rooms, only echoes remain. The walls remember every step.
Deep inside, a heart beats. Valves and circuits answer careful hands, keeping the pulse steady so the cold never wins.
Light is fragile here. It must be rebuilt, wire after wire, so the darkness never claims the walls.
Here, fear is rehearsed. Fires are imagined and smoke becomes a teacher and we learn to walk through it.
When the call comes, the cold does not matter. We carry each other’s back.
In this cold, every heartbeat is a quiet victory. The body whispers, and careful ears answer.
Even here, green survives. Tiny leaves remind us that life insists, even in the impossible.
Care is not only science. Sometimes it is warmth on a plate, a taste that melts the ice inside.
A cup of coffee; a small ritual that keeps the cold away.
Questions rise to the sky, and the wind always answers first. Data becomes a language written in ice and air.
The snow remembers. Brushes read secrets buried for years. The ice speaks to those who listen.
Out here, silence has a shape. It moves with the wind.
Eyes turn to the stars. They move slowly, endlessly, and someone follows. In their light, questions older than time wait for answers.
Night here is not an end. It is a canvas.
Beneath the surface, silence deepens. Steps echo in frozen veins of the Earth, where no sound dares follow.
The station breathes, even in the darkest hours. Snow becomes water. Metal arms move through the night, feeding the heart of this place.
The horizon changes colour. Day begins, or perhaps it never ended.
High above, waves travel through frozen air. Invisible bridges keep us from being alone.
Day and night trade places. Bodies keep moving, refusing stillness.
Time fractures here. Steps cross between its shards, gathering what storms and seasons leave behind.
We came for science, but what we found was silence. What we kept is invisible. What we left is weightless.
This is life in the base.”
Life in the Base, by Concordia’s DC21 crew
Director of photography: Clément Arrat and Julien Lacrampe
Edited by: Erik Geletti
Voice by: Nina Purvis
Cast (in order of appearance): Valentin Jarnole, Nina Purvis, Pierre Chéné, Julien Lacrampe, Yves-Marie Lahaie, Matteo Beltrame, Laerte Picano, Thomas Pagano, Simona Grimaldi, Davide Carlucci, Julien Castel, Erik Geletti, Clément Arrat.
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