HULDA RÓS GUÐNADÓTTIR

‘Becoming Sheep’ by Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir

‘Að verða sauður’ eftir Huldu Rós Guðnadóttur

Beffitting, befogging, beguiling and bethinking by Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir

‘The Story’ by Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir and Berit Schuck

May You Live in Interesting Times, 2019. About the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale that year curated by Ralph Rugoff.

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Visual Arts Experiment wins the Berlinale, 2018. About Forum Expanded section of the Berlinale film festival and the winning film that year.

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Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir from ‘Feral Attraction: The Museum of Ghost Ruminants’ - a monograph on the work of artists Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson.

Have you ever thought about artists as great contributors to the growth of human understanding and knowledge? More specifically for instance, have you thought about the contribution of Kjarval to knowledge? If it wasn ́t for Kjarval we would probably still be regarding the mountain at a distance, without thinking at all of the terrain itself, beneath our feet. He gave us a different perspective, a different way of seeing and contemplating our environment. His works have transformed us. We learned about the vegetation, the colours, the shapes and the rhythm of plants and the lumpy, rough terrain. It was as if he was a sheep. With him, we became a sheep.

Kjarval did not arrive at his conclusions by being born a genius but through the labour of art-practice-as-research. This position, of looking at the work of Kjarval and of other artists as a way to transformative knowledge, invites us to question our ideas regarding the nature of knowledge itself. Unlike what many might think, knowledge is not a progressive accumulation of scientific facts in propositional form, just as art
is not merely an imaginative expression communicating emotion. This realisation also calls into question a Western philosophical dualistic tradition. The idea that research is either a form of experimentation and empirical testing or theoretical inquiry and debate on the truth of a hypothesis in a quest for objective knowledge is at best, outdated. Outwith the ‘included’1 sciences there is a misconception that within scientific research there is some kind of absolute consensus on acceptable methods of inquiry, which at the exclusion of intuition, imagination and preference, will lead to reliable propositions concerning society and nature. If we think about knowledge instead, as a way to successful transformative experience, then looking at art-making as artistic research (where technically no such exclusions exist) starts to make a lot of sense.

In order to free our minds and make space for new ideas it is useful to look at how we came to think about art as the opposite of knowledge or research. It can be traced back to the taxonomy of judgment in the philosophy of Kant, heavily influenced by the Enlightenment and ideas that made clear distinctions between the psychological faculties of perception, imagination, understanding, reason, feeling and will. For Kant, different categories of judgment stem from those distinctions. In this, he carried forward an older idea, insisting that aesthetics was the science of feelings and void of cognitive content. It is Kant that defined knowledge as a product of conceptual synthesis, taking the form of propositional judgement while he defined aesthetic experience as subjective and based on feelings and therefore outside of the realm
of knowledge. This now outmoded school of thought lives on in the way we consider knowledge and research.

As a consequence of recalibration therefore, art research, can be seen to be by no means confined to the investigation of the nature of artistic practice itself and how its possibilities might be expanded but, as in the works of Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson it is a research instrument by which art-making helps us to know and know differently about the world. Inherent in this process-focused position is a very different idea of knowledge from the accumulation of a body of ‘proven’ or absolute statements. It also demands that we re-consider our ideas of art as a final product.

In 2014 I invited Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson to join me for a double solo exhibition project at the ASÍ art museum in Iceland, within the framework of Keep Frozen Projects, a project concerned with art-making as research. In a quest to catalyse the pluralism of artistic research the intention was to show two exemplars of doing and presenting art-practice-as-research. They suggested showing their Feral Attraction: The Museum of Ghost Ruminants – for the first time in a public setting. It was a good fit; the other show concerned fish, while Feral Attraction has, at its heart, the relations between humans, sheep and land. What attracted me immediately to their project was its cheekiness. It reminded me of the experience of first reading one of my favourite books by the Japanese author Haruki Murukami’s Wild Sheep Chase. The book describes in a very joyful way, a search for the alpha sheep itself, full of initiative and purpose, with its own agenda and game plan, in contrast to all accepted and handed-down ideas invoked by the terms ‘sheepish’ or sheep-like. I remember the exact moment and banal situation wherein I read the book and the fantastic synchronicity of noticing a sheep, made suddenly apparent to me in a decorative painting above the sofa in the strange house in Slovakia, where I was temporarily resident.

It Murukami’s book, implicit is the possibility of ‘merging’ with a sheep – in the art practice of Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson it becomes apparent that this might very much be about the process of embodied knowing, in and through the body. They sense, they move and they feel as they get to know. They learn through being in their bodies and their bodies become the tool of knowing. When they bend down to record video and take photographs from the viewpoint of imaginary sheep, foraging across the land, their bodies become sheep. As Merleau-Ponty has famously theorised, the a priori of the body to intellectual knowledge makes pre-reflective bodily intimacy with the world around us the basis of our thinking and acting. We get an alternative grip on reality much like Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson had to on that misty mountain when they were forced to act in the flow, prior to any reflection – and later, when they adjusted their bodily posture, at the same time, adjusting their perspective to that of a sheep. This pre-reflective knowledge and understanding informed their engagement with the environment and at a later stage of the research, with people, observers and participants, in applying qualitative research methods and gathering first-source and secondary data, documents and objects. At an even later stage, acting through art-making further reinforced this pre-reflective intimacy with the Tálkni area. This research process has not led however to an immutable fixed kind of knowledge, any more than the body itself and its findings are unchangeable. This knowledge is experience, interpretation – and is derived as much from physical objects and accumulated data on site, as the immaterial thinking processes and intuitive assessment of unspoken, undocumented surrounding qualities of the place, those human witnesses and indeed, the experience of becoming a sheep.

There are many ways of knowing and their artistic research – like other artistic research – offers a unique, site-informed approach, not directed at all towards generalisation or broad conceptualisation. Instead it stems from a personal perspective and experience of the subject matter, enacted in the field, in the studio and in the exhibition space, and points to the mediation of a unity of those specifics – those qualities, meanings and values. Instead of locking down and fixing the story, with their research and public exhibition making, Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson create a reflexive zone that functions as an invitation for pluralistic thinking, inevitably transgressing former boundaries. It is a knowledge produced through visual and sensory cognition, both a biological phenomenon and a cultural construct enacted within, across, between and around the artists, the artwork, the specific location and temporality – and the audience. In the process, something has happened within and across individual constellations pushing Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson and their audiences to question existing knowledge structures that are found in between and around them. This performativity of artistic research is what makes it quite distinct from humanities and social science research. The artistic practice is the methodological vehicle through which the research unfolds. By ‘becoming sheep’, the research can even be said to be participatory action research, although, in the sense that artworks and creative processes do something to and act upon us, artistic practice itself is always a performative practice. A prime function is to alter our understanding and view.

A connectionist view reminds us that in the neural networks of our brains, learning takes place as a process of ‘connecting’ where knowing is the enactment of making new connections around new ideas encountered through, for example, the acts of making and experiencing art. In this way, the brain is an enabler, allowing the owner the capacity to assess situations and generate appropriate emotions and actions. Emotions and memory thus play a leading role in the process of knowing where imagination and metaphor are key tools for understanding, as are the rest of the sensory tools of the body. In his article Artist Cognition and Creativity in the Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, Graeme Sullivan, director of Penn State School of Visual Art, identifies artistic research as a ‘post-discipline’ practice in the sense that it takes place beyond the parameters of existing knowledge systems and structures. Graeme has a point there. Inherent in art is the unusual act of embracing the paradox of inviting reflection at the same time as it avoids or withholds clear definition in respect of content. This makes art-practice-as-research exceptionally open and ready for presenting non-discursive, unfinished thinking, where all is put in the performative power of the art work. In the installation at ASÍ art museum (February 2016), this is exemplified by the extended leg bone, where the gap of significance is bridged by what we can all agree on as being an inscribed and ‘valuable’ hoop of pure silver.

The work of Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson can clearly be placed as a critique of anthropocentric views which celebrate the environmental exceptionalism of humans and is thus a story from the age of the Anthropocene, much like their previous art works, which centre on human-animal relations and challenging cultured conceptions of the wild versus the domesticated – habitat and claims to territory. Like other artistic research however, their work is not hypothesis-led but much more, an explorative journey of discovery. Much like the protagonist in Murukami’s Wild Sheep Chase, Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson undertake a search based on their intuition, guesses and hunches as they stumble across unexpected and surprising discoveries. Inspiration and clues arrive at them by chance, sometimes they drift, sometimes they follow carefully made decisions. Codifying the methodology is more a question of retrospective meta-reflectivity than a guiding rule to lead the work. Art-practice-as- research is an exploration directed at the not-yet-knowing where Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson dig into the space of the unthought, the unexpected and a world where everything could somehow be different. Somewhere along the way the concepts, thought and gestures assemble and coalesce and the art work begins to speak.

One can say that the art work of Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson has mediated for us the meaning of the interspecific experience of the Tálkni sheep, the land and the human community involved. Imagination and qualitative research methods have been applied to investigate – not only what and how something happened, but also what might otherwise have been. Furthermore, this process has been extended
and enacted in the studio and then within the exhibition venue, in order to enhance the meaning of these events and of the project as a whole. By doing this, the artists have gone through a transformative experience that is then given up to audiences in the forum that is the exhibition space. In turn they are provided with the opportunity to go through their own exploration, whereby they also undergo a transformative experience, although not necessarily in the same way as the artists. The possibility has been opened up for internalising formerly unfamiliar connections and relations; a new way of thinking about future potentialities and how we might engage differently with the world. We have gained a fresh perspective and alternative ways of seeing and feeling ... So if we have become sheep, it is not as the sheep we knew before.

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Grein eftir Huldu Rós Guðnadóttur úr ‘Ómur Óbyggðannna: Draugasafn Jórturdýranna’ - bók um verk listamannanna Bryndísar Snæbjörnsdóttur og Mark Wilson.

Hafið þið einhvern tímann leitt hugann að mögulegu framlagi listamanna til vaxandi mannskilnings og þekkingar? Svo að spurningin sé betur afmörkuð: Hafið þið einhvern tíma hugleitt framlag Kjarvals til þekkingar? Ef Kjarval hefði ekki komið til, þá værum við sennilega enn að virða fjöllin fyrir okkur úr fjarlægð, án þess að leiða hugann hið minnsta að landinu undir fótum okkar. Hann gaf okkur annað sjónarhorn, annars konar hátt á því að sjá og gaumgæfa umhverfi okkar. Málverk hans hafa umbreytt okkur. Við lærðum um gróðurinn, litina, formin og hrynjandi plantnanna og hrufótts, torfærs landsins. Það var engu líkara en hann væri sauður.

Ásamt honum urðum við að sauðum. Kjarval komst ekki að niðurstöðum sínum vegna þess að hann væri fæddur snillingur, heldur með því að leggja stund á listsköpun sem rannsókn. Þetta sjónarhorn, að skoða verk Kjarvals og annarra listamanna sem vegferð að umbreytandi þekkingu, gefur okkur kost á að draga í efa hugmyndir okkar um eðli þekkingarinnar sem slíkrar. Ólíkt því sem margir kunna að halda, er þekking
ekki áframhaldandi samsöfnun vísindalegra staðreynda sem setja má fram sem fullyrðingar, ekki fremur en list sé bara hugvitssamleg tjáning sem miðlar tilfinningum. Vitundin um þetta vefengir einnig tvíhyggjuhefð vestrænnar heimspeki. Sú hugmynd að rannsókn sé leit að hlutlægri þekkingu, ýmist með tilraunastarfsemi af einhverju tagi og raunvísindalegum prófunum eða með fræðilegum rannsóknum og rökræðum um trúverðugleika kenningar, er í besta falli úrelt. Fyrir utan heim „innvígðra“1 vísinda gætir þess misskilnings að meðal þeirra sem stunda vísindalegar rannsóknir ríki einhvers konar óskorað samkomulag um viðunandi rannsóknaraðferðir sem, þegar innsæið hefur verið sent í útlegð ásamt ímyndunarafli og dálæti, muni geta af sér áreiðanlegar kennisetningar um samfélagið og náttúruna. Ef við nú hugsum í staðinn um þekkinguna sem leið til árangursríkrar umbreytandi reynslu, þá virðist vera mikið vit í því að líta á listsköpun sem listræna rannsókn (en innan hennar er tæknilega ekki um slíka útlegð að ræða).

Til þess að veita huganum frelsi og skapa rými fyrir nýjar hugmyndir er gagnlegt að gæta að því hvernig á því stendur að við fórum að líta á list sem andstæðu þekkingar eða rannsóknar. Það má rekja aftur til flokkunarfræði dómgreindarinnar í heimspeki Kants, sem var undir miklum áhrifum frá upplýsingarstefnunni og hugmynda sem gerðu skýran greinarmun á sálargáfunum skynjun, ímyndunarafli, skilningi, skynsemi, tilfinningum og vilja. Hjá Kant leiddi mismunandi tegundir dómgreindar af þessum hæfileikum. Í þessum efnum studdist hann við eldri hugmynd þar sem staðhæft var að fagurfræði heyrði undir vísindi tilfinninganna og væri alveg laus við vitsmunalegt innihald. Það var Kant sem skilgreindi þekkingu sem afurð vitsmunalegra átaka andstæðna, sem birtist í fastmótaðri dómgreind, en fagurfræðilega reynslu skilgreindi hann sem huglæga og grundvallaða á tilfinningum og því utan sviðs þekkingarinnar. Þessi úrelti hugsanagangur er enn við lýði í viðhorfum okkar til þekkingar og rannsókna.

Það leiðir því af uppstokkun á mælikvörðunum að engan veginn er hægt að líta svo á að listrannsóknir takmarkist við rannsóknir á eðli listrænnar sköpunar í sjálfu sér og því hvernig víkka megi út möguleika hennar, heldur er hún, eins og sjá má í verkum Bryndísar Snæbjörnsdóttur og Marks Wilson, rannsóknartæki og þannig gagnast listsköpun okkur við að kynnast veröldinni og vita skil á henni á annan hátt. Það sem felst í þessari ferlismiðuðu afstöðu er hugmynd um þekkingu sem er afar frábrugðin samsöfnun „sannreyndra“ eða óvefengjanlegra fullyrðinga. Auk þess gerir hún þá kröfu til okkar að við endurskoðum hugmyndir okkar um listaverk sem lokaafurð.

Árið 2014 bauð ég Bryndísi og Wilson að taka þátt í tvöfaldri einkasýningu með mér í Listasafni ASÍ í Reykjavík, innan ramma Frystigeymsluverkefnisins (Keep Frozen Projects), verkefnis sem snerist um listsköpun sem rannsókn. Í von um að hvatt yrði til fjölhyggju í listrænum rannsóknum var ætlunin að sýna tvö dæmi um ástundun og framsetningu listsköpunar sem rannsóknar. Þau stungu upp á því að þau sýndu verk sitt Ómur Óbyggðanna: Draugasafn Jórturdýranna (Feral Attraction: The Museum of Ghost Ruminants) – í fyrsta sinn á opinberum vettvangi. Þetta var góð samsetning; önnur sýningin snerist um fisk, en Ómur Óbyggðanna er í kjarna sínum um tengsl milli manna, sauða og lands. Það sem heillaði mig undireins við verk þeirra var hversu óskammfeilið það er. Það minnti mig á þá upplifun þegar ég las í fyrsta sinn eina af mínum eftirlætisbókum eftir japanska rithöfundinn Haruki Murakami, Eltingarleikur við villisauð (Wild Sheep Chase). Bókin lýsir á mjög kátlegan máta leit að sjálfum alfasauðnum, sem er gagntekinn af framtakssemi og stefnufestu, með sína dagskrá og leikáætlun, alveg andstætt öllum viðteknum og gamalkunnugum hugmyndum sem hugtakið „sauðarlegur“ kallar fram. Ég man nákvæmlega hvenær og við hvaða hversdagslegu aðstæður ég las bókina og þá furðulegu tilviljun að á sama tíma tók ég eftir sauð sem birtist mér skyndilega á skrautlegu málverki yfir sófanum í sérkennilegu húsi í Slóvakíu þar sem ég dvaldi um hríð.

Í bók Murakamis er gefinn í skyn sá möguleiki að „renna saman við“ sauð – í listsköpun Bryndísar og Marks verður auðsætt að þessi samruni snýst mögulega að miklu leyti um það ferli að afla sér líkamnaðrar þekkingar, með líkamanum og í gegnum hann. Þau skynja, hreyfa sig og finna til meðan þekkingarleitin fer fram. Þau læra af því að vera í líkömum sínum og líkamar þeirra verða tæki til þekkingaröflunar. Þegar þau lúta niður til að taka upp myndband og taka ljósmyndir frá sjónarhorni ímyndaðs sauðar, á ráfi um landið í ætisleit, breytast líkamar þeirra í sauði. Eins og kemur fram í frægri kenningu Merleau-Pontys, gerir forsenduleysi líkamans samanborið við vitsmunalega þekkingu það að verkum að óíhuguð líkamleg náin tengsl við veröldina í kringum okkur eru grundvöllur hugsana okkar og athafna. Við öðlumst annars konar skilning á veruleikanum, rétt eins og Bryndís og Mark öðluðust í þokunni á fjallinu þegar þau voru knúin til að láta berast með straumnum, án umhugsunar – og síðar, þegar þau breyttu líkamsstellingum sínum og gerðu um leið sjónarhorn sauðanna að sínu. Þessi óíhugaða þekking og skilningur einkenndi samband þeirra við umhverfið og, á síðari stigum, við fólk, áhorfendur

og þátttakendur, þegar kom að því að beita eigindlegum rannsóknaraðferðum og safna vitnisburðum frá fyrstu hendi og öðrum gögnum, skjölum og hlutum. Á enn síðari stigum leiddi listsköpunin til enn sterkari óíhugaðra náinna tengsla við fjallið Tálkna. Þetta rannsóknarferli hefur þó ekki getið af sér óbreytanlega, óhagganlega þekkingu, enda er líkaminn sjálfur heldur ekki óbreytanlegur og uppgötvanir hans eru ekki óhagganlegar. Þekkingin felst í reynslu, túlkun – og er ekki síður sprottin af áþreifanlegum hlutum og gögnum sem var safnað saman á rannsóknarvettvanginum en af óefnislegum hugsanaferlum og mati innsæisins á óyrtum, óskráðum umlykjandi eiginleikum staðarins, vitnisburðum fólks og síðast, en ekki síst, reynslunni af því að verða sauður.

Það eru til margar aðferðir við að afla þekkingar og hin listræna rannsókn Bryndísar og Mark – eins og aðrar listrænar rannsóknir – býður upp á einstæða, staðareinkennda nálgun sem miðar engan veginn að alhæfingu eða almennri hugmyndamótun. Þess í stað er hún sprottin af persónulegu sjónarhorni og reynslu af umfjöllunarefninu, sem er sviðsett á rannsóknarvettvanginum, á vinnustofunni og í sýningarrýminu, og bendir til málamiðlandi samræmis þessara einstöku atriða – þessara eiginleika, merkinga og gilda. Í stað þess að njörva niður og fastákvarða söguna, með rannsóknunum og opinberri sýningu, skapa Bryndís og Mark rými til íhugunar sem býður heim fjölhyggjulegum hugsunum, sem óhjákvæmilega ganga
út yfir fyrri mörk. Þetta er þekking sem er orðin til í krafti sjónrænna og skynrænna vitsmuna, og er bæði líffræðilegt fyrirbæri og menningarleg hugsmíð sem verður til hið innra, í samspili listamannanna og í kringum þá, listaverkið, og tilteknar og tímabundnar aðstæður – og áhorfendur. Í ferlinu hefur eitthvað gerst innan einstakra þyrpinga og í innbyrðis afstöðu þeirra sem knýr Bryndísi og Mark og áhorfendurna til að efast um þær þekkingarsmíðar sem eru innra með þeim og allt í kringum þau. Þessi líkamstjáning í listrænni rannsókn gerir hana harla frábrugðna hugvísindalegum og félagsvísindalegum rannsóknum. Listsköpunin er hinn aðferðafræðilegi miðill sem leiðir rannsóknina smám saman í ljós. Þar eð hlutskipti rannsakandans er „að verða sauður“, má segja að rannsóknin geti talist þátttöku og aðgerðarannsókn, enda þótt listsköpun sé í sjálfu sér alltaf líkamlegur gjörningur í þeim skilningi að listaverk og skapandi ferli hafa áhrif á okkur. Megintilgangur listsköpunar er að breyta skilningi okkar og viðhorfum.

Viðhorf tengihyggjusinna minna okkur á að í tauganetum heilans á lærdómur sér stað sem ferli „tenginga“ þar sem þekking felst í því að mynda nýjar tengingar í kringum nýjar hugmyndir sem skjóta óvænt upp kollinum þegar til dæmis list er sköpuð eða listar er notið. Á þennan hátt gerir heilinn okkur kleift að meta aðstæður og bregðast við með viðeigandi tilfinningum og hegðun. Tilfinningar og minni gegna þess vegna meginhlutverki í þekkingarferlinu þar sem ímyndunarafl og mynd- líkingar eru lykiltæki í skilningi, rétt einsog sönnur skynfæri líkamans. Í ritgerð sinni um hugarstarf og sköpun listamannsins (Artist Cognition and Creativity) í yfirlitsbók um listrannsóknir (Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts) lýsir Graeme Sullivan, rektor Penn State-sjónlistaskólans, listrænni rannsókn sem „eftir- vísindagrein“ í þeim skilningi að hún á sér stað handan marka þeirra þekkingarkerfa sem til eru. Graeme hefur nokkuð til síns máls í þessu efni. Óaðskiljanleg frá listinni er sú óvenjulega afstaða að taka opnum örmum þeirri mótsögn sem felst í því að bjóða heim vangaveltum á sama tíma og farið er á svig við eða því hafnað að skilgreina inntakið með skýrum hætti. Þetta gerir það að verkum að listsköpun sem rannsókn er einstaklega opin og vel til þess fallin að setja fram óröklega þanka án endanlegrar niðurstöðu, þar sem allt er sett í tjáningarkraft listaverksins.

Í innsetningunni í Listasafni ASÍ (í febrúar 2016) er þetta sýnt með framlengda fótleggjarbeininu þar sem hin mikilvæga eyða er brúuð með því sem við öll getum verið sammála um að sé áletruð og „dýrmæt“ gjörð úr hreinu silfri.

Augljóslega er hægt að líta á verk Bryndísar og Mark sem gagnrýni á það mannmiðjuviðhorf sem heldur því á lofti hve einstakur maðurinn sé í umhverfinu og er þannig saga frá tímum mannaldarinnar, og sama má segja um fyrri verk þeirra, sem snúast um tengsl manna og dýra og ganga á hólm við fágaðar hugmyndir um hið villta samanborið við hið tamda – kjörlendi og kröfur um landsvæði. Hins vegar er list þeirra, líkt og aðrar listrænar rannsóknir, ekki knúin áfram af skýringartilgátum heldur mun fremur könnunarleiðangur til að gera uppgötvanir. Á margan hátt eiga Bryndís og Mark það sameiginlegt með söguhetjunni í Eltingarleik við villisauð eftir Murakami að þau leggja upp í leit sem byggist á innsæi þeirra, getgátum og hugboðum meðan þau hnjóta um óvæntar og furðulegar uppgötvanir. Innblástur og vísbendingar verða tilviljunarkennt á vegi þeirra, stundum ráfa þau stefnulaust um, stundum fylgja þau eftir vandlega útfærðum ákvörðunum. Kerfisbinding aðferðafræðinnar snýst fremur um hæfni til víðfeðmrar íhugunar en leiðarvísi til að vinna verkið eftir. Listsköpun sem rannsókn er könnunarleiðangur sem beinist að þekkingu sem enn er ekki til staðar, þar sem Bryndís og Mark rannsaka gaumgæfilega rými þess sem enn hefur ekki verið hugsað, þess sem ekki er búist við og heim þar sem allt gæti með einhverjum hætti verið öðruvísi. Einhvers staðar í ferlinu safnast hugtökin, hugsanirnar og táknin saman, og þau renna saman og listaverkið fær rödd.

Segja má að listaverk Bryndísar og Mark hafi miðlað okkur merkingu gagnvirkrar og skilmerkilegrar reynslunnar af sauðunum í Tálkna, landinu og því mannlega samfélagi sem í hlut átti. Ímyndunarafli og eigindlegum rannsóknaraðferðum var beitt við að rannsaka ekki aðeins hvað gerðist og hvernig það gerðist, heldur einnig það sem hefði getað verið með öðrum hætti. Ennfremur hefur þetta ferli verið framlengt og sett upp í vinnustofu og svo á sýningarvettvanginum til þess að ljá merkingu þessara atburða meira vægi, sem og verkefninu í heild. Með því að gera þetta hafa listamennirnir öðlast umbreytandi reynslu sem er svo miðlað til áhorfenda í sýningarrýminu. Fyrir vikið er þeim gefið færi á að fara í sinn eigin könnunarleiðangur, þar sem einnig þeir geta öðlast umbreytandi reynslu, þótt það gerist ekki endilega með sama hætti og hjá listamönnunum. Opnast hefur fyrir þann möguleika að gera áður ókunnug tengsl og sambönd að sínum; nýja leið til að hugsa um það sem er mögulegt í framtíðinni og hvernig við getum tengst heiminum öðruvísi. Við höfum fengið nýtt sjónarhorn og eigum þess kost að horfa og skynja með öðrum hætti ... Þannig að ef við erum orðin að sauðum, þá erum við þó ekki þeir sauðir sem við þekktum fyrrum.

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Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir from ‘The Provincialists’ - a lecture performed at the Reykjavik Academy in 2008 and published that same year.

Befitting, befogging, beguiling and bethinking

I will start with a bold statement. Art, similar to mass-media, is not the reflection of or a catalyst on the needs and desires of the human kind, or some kind of a fixed reality. Art like mass-media tells you what the reality is, what your needs and desires are.

What makes the creation of art desirable is its inherent possibility of participation in a self-critical society. Art does that by creating a disturbance that subverts the power of the normalized over mind and matter, a violence where the view of the individual has lost its value against democracy. Thus, I look at my work as being part of defining the present or at least influencing the direction the discourses of the present can possible take.

Back to the Province, I believe I was asked to take part in this conference to talk about my art and curatorial projects and some ideas I have about the state of mind of the people that together form the Icelandic society. These are ideas that are very much reflected in my works and that have a lot to to with the term provincialism. Rather than directly refrencing scholarly texts and discourses to strengthen my discussion I’m gona talk from my gut in a similar way that I do my art.

As a general outline I will first talk about my most recent work, the sculpture Don’t stop me know. I’m having such a good time, a playful and analytical work about the new Icelandic hero in the post-colonial newly-rich Icelandic society. Second, I will talk about the work I have been travelling with between exhbitions in Berlin, Copenhagen, Reykjavik and next Barcelona titled Don’t feed them after midnight -

The Cult of the cute gremlin puffin. Another playful but analytical work about the image of the young Icelandic artist as created by the foreign music press. A last I will talk about the curatorial project DIONYSIA, which has been boiling in the pots for more than a year now with mini-residency programs taking place in eight different provincial towns in Iceland from the 9th to the 19th of June.

Don’t stop me now. I’m having such a good time.

I start by reading the artist statement full of unsupported opinions.

Artist statement

The new hero of the Icelandic society is the money-man, the stock venturist, the bank manager. He shines in a glorious, luminous and uncriticized light parallel to the light that shone on the fisherman that in the past sailed on his dangerous journey on the Atlantic ocean and caught fish in the unlimited horizons of the sea, or the cowboy of the wild west in America that rode fast as the wind, free as the bird, on the plains of the new land and conquered new provinces. The mass media is the biggest active participant in the creation of the New hero, with its pages filled with stories of parties, special deals which they receive when their employment contracts end, and staggering profits. This is a boys game, the search for the essence of manlyhood. The money-man is expanding abroad, he is conquering the world, he throws his friends and beneficiaries grand parties in the spirit of the gods of Valhalla. He is the Man.

The other side of Newly-rich Iceland is broken security. Each and everyone thinks solely about themselves and those closest to them and has always wanted that jeep like the advertisement says. This is a condition that leaves behind a trail of dirty carbage, inner and outer. That which is alluring, the diamonds and the shining cars are really the sharp oblivion of greed.

The art object in this work is the money-man depicted as a young Lucky Luke without saddle riding his 3 meters tall metal horse that rises on his hind legs up in the air with the cheerful cowboyish busineess man flying in the air. They are on a fast speed conquering new provinces, catching the fish, with the horses’ mane flying in all directions along with the horsemans arms, as the horse wades in sparkling broken glass that resembles glamorous diamonds. The whole scenery looking extraordinary playful and set in motion, the object itself looking like somekind of old-fashioned monument, just not cast in bronze but used car tinplates.

The material and form used in the work is loaded with symbolism from my personal language used to discuss the concept behind the work. The way the broken security glass is spotlighted to reflect back like diamonds; the use and random color combination of the tinplates from used cars, a material found in abundance in this country; the overwhelming size of the horse in comparison to the cowboy riding it and the space in which it is exhibited; the visible use of paper-machè in the cowboy hat,; the use of shiny lack in the painting of the face and hands; the clothing combination of suits, cowboy gangster cloth and comboy boots; the visibility of the structure and the oil and tar grease on the other side of the shiny but scratched surfaces of the tin; the caricature cartoon feeling of the overall sculpture; the two-dimensional title reference; the surface use of humour and play, to name a few elaborately thought through elements. All of which reference the state of mind in the Icelandic society today.

What this has this to do with the term provincialism? When I was studying at the University of Iceland in the late nineties I took a lot of theoretical and empirical classes on neo-colonialism and colonial history within the anthropological department but what struck me most was a course I took in African colonial and post-colonial literature. In those books the authors cleverly described the behaviour of the newly rich, newly empowered political and economical elite of these African countries in their post-colonial state of affairs. What was so interesting about it was how much it reminded me of the situation in Iceland. A very unpopular opinion around here.

But the resemblance has never been stronger than now. As many of you know the term province was created in a colonial situation to describe areas conquered by the powerful center. It was thus created as a power tool to maintain power relations between center and the conquered, undermining the rest of the world , the Other. The post-colonial situation is a very reactionary atmosphere to the stigma of being labelled a province. Post-colonial situation is in my mind characterised by an over emphasize on belonging to the contemporary center through gaining the possession of all the symbols that define that very same center.

In a post-colonial situation the need to prove oneself as contemporary is very important. In my work Don´t stop me know. I´m having such a good time I´m not criticising but analysing a situation that should be discussed from many different points of view. I´m including the financial sector directly in the work by paying for the cost of it with a grant from Glitnir, one of the main international investments banks in this country. I don´t see it as black and white cold war situation that many always seem to want to lead any kind of discussion towards. The important function of art being here the ability to criticize, to analyze and to define the moment. I think it is time to acknowledge the fact that we are still constantly reacting to the stigma of the province label every step of the way.

And on that note of being reactionary I go to the second topic on my list.

Don’t feed them after midnight - The Cult of the cute gremlin puffin

I start again by reading the artist statement, also full of unsupported opinions.

Artist statement

The figure of the Icelandic artist has over the past few years achieved an original status through an identification process that has been granted by the international music press. This has involved the creation of a mythology that revolves around a cute-like identity that affects the psyche of the individual artist to the extent that he has come to look upon the myth as being his own creation.

At this point one can talk about the mystifying cult of the cute, weird, elf-like and nature oriented phenomena of the Icelandic artist. The reality of this cute (krutt) image comes with a proviso, especially within Reykjavik’s promiscuous bar scene: like Gremlins, the cute often becomes monstrous after midnight. This Gremlin is both exotic and erotically charged, and its not afriad to play with it. Icelandic art Gremlins, in particular, are a real curiosity.

Here it is interesting to note how the image of the puffin – the Icelandic bird - has been changed to cater to the tourist industry. The most recent images being a direct visual reference to Minnie Mouse. The puffin as a special brand instead of blood thirsty carnivore has become the icon of cuteness with big, round, endearing eyes and a soft cuddly body. A parallel can under these circumstances be drawn between the mechanism of cuteness and that of horniness. The postures and intonations of the classical porn scene utilizes the same mechanisms as does an extremely cute puffin in that it invokes an involuntary response of a sympathetic nature. The puffin, like Minnie Mouse before her, has become a curious hybrid of desire production.

Gizmo turned into a Gremlin, which is the reverse process of the puffin turned Minnie Mouse, and the artist changed by the Cult of the Cute are all examples of opportunities of ironic intervention – a tool that our generation has to fight the melancholic boredom that accompanies the seemingly latté-ridden meaninglessness of modern life. It’s a game of reappropriation, of taking control over the creation of meaning of the symbols representing one’s own identity.

The art object in this work is an installation with a soft puppet sculpture; video which is somewhere in between being a documentation of a street performance and being an independent expressionistic video work in itself; heavily photoshoped photograph; a dirty piece of a can can dress on the floor and hand-painted or printed puffin hoodies.

The central piece, the sculpture, is at the same time somekind of a hybrid between being a puffin and a woman and a performance outfit and a sculpture. Worn as a costume during the street performance it transforms into a string puppet in the exhibition space.

The performance took place in one of the main gallery streets in the art metropolis of Berlin with the cute hybrid puffinwoman roaming confusingly around the street in front of Kunst-werke with a sign that said on one side; I´m a very special artist from Iceland, but on the flip side saying; Do you want to fuck? A very disturbing message from such a Disney like character evoking all kinds of responses from the art world pedestrians on the street from see you later sweetie or do you remember me to people dancing the puffin dance.

The documentation of the puffin stroll through the street, along with footage of people´s responses from the puffin’s point of view was mixed, in the video, with confusingly shot street scenery, also seen from the eyes of the puffin. The soundtrack is a mix of the famous Sigurrós song Saeljon and a song by Thor that bears a striking resemblance to the cute like music of Mum with all its bells and analog sound clips.

The photograph being an image of the puffin as a woman in the colorful Minnie mouse style red dress, mirrored at the middle with vagina symbols all over it, is another disturbing mix of cute and erotic. In the photo the puffinwoman is an empowered erotic goddess looking at you from above contradicting the self-humiliated puffin of the video.

Finally belonging to the piece are puffin hoodies thought of as an extension of the performance part of the installation. During the opening in Berlin six individuals walked around in the hoodies interacting with the guests. Today the hoodies are sold in concept design shops in Berlin, Reykjavik and Barcelona. Those who buy them will become a part of the Cult of the cute gremlin puffin, unknowingly performing as they walk around on the street.

And what has this to do with the term provincialism? The idea for the work arose from a little less than two decades of experience of living extensively abroad experiencing the images of the Icelander directly being bombarded on my own skin. Living in the States when the Sugarcubes became famous in the early nineties I had the first experience of being an exotic object. There and then I was some kind of weird ice-princess living in a igloo back home, and of course very special. Then this image developed through massive marketing in the international music press until the first question I normally received from prominent people within the art scene, while living in Berlin last year, had become; Do you believe in elves? Of course I could have stuck to the image and sold myself as an artist of special interest to these people by saying Yes. But I didn´t. It is my belief that this excoticisation that has brought so much interest and opportunites for the Icelandic artist is also our biggest achilles heal. If we continue to verify the image it will sooner than later turn on us. What we are doing is getting caught in the old fashioned dichotomy of the urban vices the province, physically and exotically remote, outdated and only of matter of curiosity instead of being a valuable member of the intellectual discourse taking place. As soon as the hype of the Scandinavian exotic Other looses its interest in the eye of the art power elite, constantly in search of the New Hot, we will be left behind with no real substance.

This is the same as happened to the image of the puffin. What is this Disney figure we see everywhere? It has little to do with the original living animal. A complex being of many nexuses. Identity is not fixed. It is dynamic and changes with every new experience and context. It´s a fictional and personal creation. We don´t want to become a product meeting the demand for an exotic Other. In this work art becomes a play of taking the symbols that define you into your own hands in order to regain power over them by creating your own mythology. This is a mythology that helps us to deal with the future with all it´s open possibilites. We are in control of our own destiny.

Dionysia

Lingering on the dramatizing word destiny I will turn to my last topic. The curatorial project DIONYSIA. I start with the 5-Ws.

What?

DIONYSIA is all about breaking boundaries, inner and outer, that are created by the categorization fixation and the hierchical thinking that evolves from it. More than 40 artists are going in small groups to eight different villages around Iceland. They idea is that the artists work together and with the local creative talents. The project is heavily sponsored by these townships that er giving the artists a place to sleep, work and perform or exhibit. They municapilites are also serving as a key to the community by offering to connect people together. Another main sponsor is Orkan, gasoline company, that is paying for gasoline for everybody to get to the places. Enough sponsor talk!

Where?

DIO choose places that are really obscure and out of the main ring-road number one, that goes all around the country, dividing the coastline from the uninhabitable highland. and that most travellers in Iceland limit their experience too. DIO choose places like Djupavik á Ströndum, Bolungarvík, Hafnir, Grundarfjörður, Borgarfjörður eystri, Stöðvarfjörður, Hofsós and Siglufjörður, that all have in common that you will have to drive for hours off the main road just to reach your destination. In the eyes of the Reykjavik art crowd these are the real provinces of the country.

Who?

DIO puts great emphasize on that the purpose of this residency programme is to get artists of different artistic and creative backgrounds to work together. Therefore we have chosen people with backgrounds in music, writing, theory, documentary, visual arts, theater and happenings and design, to participate. This is an international crowd of young artists under 40 years of age and is a nice mix of individuals in their mid-careers, just starting or still a student.

DIO also sees the creative talents in the townships as important participants and has great expectations towards their contribution. Contrary to the aluminium focused government we believe the country to be full of those talents and the creativity to be blossoming.

We want to connect these people together.

When?

The project has been in preparation for more than a year now. It has grown from a small idea to becoming a gigantic organizational task. Since January a committee of ten artists from all different art backgrounds have been working together intensively to make it happen. These days DÍÓ is running the final few meters with 13 cars leaving Reykjavik on the 9th of June heading in all different directions. The residency is planned to last ten days characterized by intense work and networking.

A kick start will be a welcoming meeting hosted by the townships on the day of arrival where locals and outsiders are connected together. Before leaving town art exhbitions will be opened and left to live for the rest of the summer. That does not mean that DIONYSIA has reached its end. Several ideas for future events are boiling in the pots. For example publishing an art book and use texts and other visual material created during these ten days as building blocks and having some kind of harvest festival in Reykjavik next year where it all comes together. And of course what is most important is the contacts that have been made and will last into the future.

Why?

Why are we putting all this effort into this? Now I’m gona be on a very personal note again. Hope it will not become boring to you. This may sound over-dramatic but when I got the idea for the project one and a half year ago I felt like I wanted to give something back to the universe. I had been and was planning to exhibit and meet people in many different art centers of the USA and Europe and had the feeling that the opportunities for young Icelandic artists were growing very rapidly in numbers. Since then my network and curriculum vitae has grown even stronger. All this was exciting to me but I felt the whirlwind close to the center of the art world was not really satisfying in the end. Sure I met many interesting people, famous people, super intelligent and talented people, and had many interesting discussions and adventures which I love but I wanted something with more substance. I found it strange that it was cheaper and easier for me to go and stay in New York, London, Paris, Copenhagen and Berlin than to go to any place inside my own country, except maybe Seydisfjordur. I could also feel a real desire among the Icelandic artists around me to move or stay for a while somewhere else than in Reykjavik.

During the course of the execution of the DIONYSIA project I have talked to hundreds of people and found out many different things. Some were surprising , others not. A good example is the following. At the beginning we were really interested in mobilising the Icelandic art students as we thought about the project in terms of taking care of your own garden and at the same time we were really interested in crossing the invisible boundaries between student artist and graduated artist. Surprisingly in the end only ten of over forty participants are Icelandic art students coming from all departments of the Icelandic Academy of the Arts. It is surprising when compared to the Ring-road exhibition trip, Hringferdin, that was organised for the students of the visual arts department in the year 2000. Then 45 people from that department alone participated. Back then it was looked upon as a real opportunity for the unexperienced art student to exhibit in the country-side but today the story is different. The opportunities are so many in the eyes of the student. They are already looking towards the international scene where the selection takes place.

So in the end the main bulk of Icelandic artists participating are young artists already with some experience of the international art scene and that have learned to appreciate the opportunities in their own back garden. Half of the participants are international which we think fits nicely to the project. We have gone to the center, networked and now we are bringing those connections back home.

What has this to do with the term provincialism? Well the DIONYSIA project shows very well that being provincial is relative. Int the art center Reykjavik is provincial, in the eyes of the 101 crowd the villages are provincial, in the eyes of the foreigner whole Iceland is avant-garde. I wrote this lecture in Borgarfjordur eystri, a tiny village of 100 people. In the eyes of the people here I’m Skulina which is a female version of my employers name. Soon when DIONYSIA arrives my identity will probably change. I have the feeling that when the concept provincialism is being visualized it is done in terms of geography with some fixed people within that category. Accordingly to particular province particular people belong and are provincial per se, or urban if we look at it from the other perspective.

Well this is an outdated feudal way of thinking. As outdated as a classical left and right winged politics. Or a cold war dichotomy. Personally I look at myself as living in Reykjavik, Berlin and Borgarfjordur eystri at the same time as I have active social role and identity in each of these places. Who am I? Metropolitan, urban, provincial or some kind of floading entity? The same person can be a nexus of many different identities. In the same way as I’m seen as a student or a teacher or a filmmaker or a visual artist or an anthropologist or a designer or a patient or a party-girl or a daughter or a trouble maker or a looser or an overaachiever or a journalist or a lecturer, a Berliner, depending on who is looking at me the same person can be provincial and urban and whatever she likes at the same time. The same person can be an actor in Berlin, visual artist in Reykjavik,a guesthouse manager in Borgarfjordur eystri and a filmmaker at some international conferences.

It is all a construction of the mind that has been heavily influenced by outdated categories and hierarchies. This mindset needs to be broken down in order to be creativily free. And because the rest of the world mostly thinks in hiearchies as an Icelander I will always be provincial when leaving Iceland to go to the metropolis. But let’s not forget that a truly creative metropolis is build up of people from everywhere, from all the provinces. That is why it is metropolis, the biggest Province. Having lost the feudal thinking about myself and other I’m ready to befit, befog, beguile and bethink.

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Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir and Berit Schuck from ‘Keep Frozen: Art-Practice-As-Research. The Artist´s View.’

Keep Frozen began as a journey into the unknown. When I started working on this project, I did not know that it would become an ongoing research project about different harbour cities along the Atlantic coast, visual art as a medium and its relation to our society. Neither did I know I would begin the research in Bíldudalur, a small fishing village in the Westfjords of Iceland, and Reykjavík, and that I would later extend it to include Essaouira, an old harbour city on the West Coast of Morocco, and Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York
City. Initially, I simply had the intuition that I should spend some time in an Icelandic fishing village in order to explore my idea of such a place and compare my childhood memories with the current situation. But why Iceland? What made me want to visit a fishing village? And why at this moment in my life?

CLOSE-UP ON A SHOP WINDOW THAT MIRRORS THE ARTIST’S FACE. SOMEWHERE IN BERLIN-MITTE. GREYISH LIGHT. STREET NOISE MIXES WITH THE SOUND OF THE COLD WINTER RAIN.

On April Fools’ Day 2009, I moved to Berlin. I was a thirtysomething artist from Iceland who had completed her studies in anthropology, design and visual art, travelled the world and lived in many different cities. I had already spent a year in Berlin a few years previously, and was now interested in placing my work in the
context of the Berlin art scene to develop my practice in dialogue with like-minded people. I had received an artist stipend, which allowed me to work on something new upon my arrival in the city, and I began to work on a site-specific installation about an abandoned amusement park in the east of the city, later titled Hops Hopsi. The park was eerie. So was my mood. What I had left behind was a homeland recently declared bankrupt. It was during this time that childhood memories of travelling between Icelandic fishing villages began to haunt me. The memories that haunted me were from the days of travelling around
Iceland with my parents, who were small industrialists producing plastic fish tubs1 , the ones that you would find in any Icelandic harbour. I had spent vacations in the 1980s on the docks, observing people and their work, objects, colours, material, reflections and shapes that belonged to the harbour area. If people were categorising this reality as part of an irrelevant past, I was going to go there and see where it would lead me personally.

These memories were certainly evoked by my current situation, that of being an artist from Iceland trying to find her place in Berlin, while at the same time working on Hops Hopsi and therefore delving deep in research about the situation in the country I had left behind. By leaving, I had gained enough perspective on the day-to-day situation that I could view dispassionately what was being expressed in public discourse in Iceland. Moreover, I felt I was able to place my finger on what the problem was. I felt Iceland’s crisis was not simply one of corrupt politicians and bad economic management, or even the failure of the global economic system, but also of the attitudes of the Icelandic people. It seemed to me that they were stuck in a stubborn denial of who they were at their very core, and were thus doomed to wander aimlessly around on Groundhog Day, repeating the same mistakes time and again. There was more. In addition to my research about the park in Berlin, I was also organising a residency programme called Dionysia,2 which gathered international artists in different Icelandic villages. The renewed encounter with the Icelandic rural community helped inform my impression that the dilemma at home was also caused in part by the growing gap between urban residents and the villages from which they came (1st–3rd generation). I was frustrated
to see what was going on in my homeland and developed the desire to look at the situation more closely. What if I returned to Iceland and experienced the people and places of my childhood memories as though I were one of the international artists for whom I was organising residencies in Icelandic villages? What if I
returned to Iceland as an artist who was interested in meeting the locals for an exchange of informal knowledge and skills? What if I planned my next visit as if it were a research trip?

CLOSE-UP ON THE ARTIST’S CAMERA. THEN SLIGHTLY ZOOMING OUT AND PAN, FOLLOWING THE CAMERA UNTIL THERE IS A FULL STOP AT A MEDIUM LONG SHOT. RACK FOCUS. BRIGHT COLOURED BUOYS EVERYWHERE, PLASTIC OBJECTS, NO FISH. MOTORSOUNDS, SOMETIMES LOUDER, SOMETIMES FROM FAR AWAY. THE SKY IS BRIGHT, CRISP AND BLUE, AND THE STILLNESS IS INFINITE.

In April 2010, I flew to Iceland, and in May I was in Bíldudalur, a small fishing village of 166 inhabitants in the Westfjords of Iceland. Gilles Deleuze explains in his L’Abécédaire with Claire Parnet that ‘desire’ is never related to a specific object or place but rather to the relation between that object or place and oneself. When I arrived in Bíldudalur in May 2010 – echoing Deleuze – I was simply following my desire to see myself in an Icelandic fishing village. I wanted to interrupt the stream of ghostly flickering images that haunted me in Berlin, and create or recreate a relation between myself and Icelandic village culture.

In Bíldudalur, I initially ran around rather aimlessly and alone. I walked out of town and took some pictures of found objects, mostly hard, plastic buoys, and of the rocky beach and the fjord. I played with the items I found and made some still lifes of buoy combinations. I visited the deserted dock, and when the opportunity arose, I watched a small fishing boat arrive and two men unload some fish tubs filled with fresh fish. I shot some video clips and was fascinated by the red blood that came with the fresh fish and was running down the dock, and I realised only later on how difficult it was to capture these moments. The consumer image of food production does not allow for connections to be drawn to blood and guts. After the implementation of the Transferable Quota system in the late 1980s, and the subsequent sale of the larger fishing trawlers away from the village in the early 90s, the pier looked like it was almost never used. The village itself and the villagers seemed to be strangely disconnected from the dock, unlike what I experienced during my holidays in the pre-quota times, when the dock was clearly the beating heart of those fishing towns. The lonely dock worker was kind enough to cut me a fish fillet after I complained about the lack of fresh fish in the local grocery store. I had noticed that the only store in the village, called Vegamót 3 (or ‘crossroads’), which was at once a restaurant, a grocery shop and a gas station, was unable
to offer a single fresh fish. They only sold a few fresh fruits, huge amounts of canned and paper-wrapped consumer foods and a crazy selection of sweets. I also went to the local fish factory, which employed mostly migrant workers. There was a rather small conveyor belt on which the catch of the day was being cut into fillets. It looked very modern, clean and technologically advanced. I then noticed a large fish tub at the end of the belt, which was being filled with fish skeletons, heads attached, that had been removed while producing the fish fillets, fit for the market. All of a sudden, I had the idea to create a situation which would expose the relation of the villagers to the fishing trade. I exchanged the goods, placing the skeletons with the attached fish heads in the glass counter of the Vegamót shop, the cans and the paper packages on the conveyor belt in the fish factory, and I took photographs and shot a video clip.

MEDIUM LONG SHOT OF THE ARTIST O N T H E D O C K S . A F I S H T R AW L E R F R O M NORWAY APPROACHING THE DOCKS. THE SKY IS BRILLIANTLY PURPLE IN THE EARLY MORNING DARKNESS. SEAGULLS SCREAM IN CO-ORDINATION WITH THE RHYTHMIC SOUNDS OF STAPLE GUNS AND METAL
RODS HITTING EACH OTHER.

I used the visit to Iceland in Spring 2010 to also initiate a site-specific project involving Reykjavík, the city my maternal grandmother had emigrated to after being raised in Bíldudalur. It was also the city in which my mother was born and gave birth to me in 1973. I was raised not so far from the midtown harbour whose existence had been instrumental in making Reykjavík the largest and wealthiest town in Iceland. The wealth created a generation of a large middle-class, which in the late 1960s, 70s and 80s gave birth to what has become a substantial creative class. It was in this very spring of 2010 that representatives of the creative generation won the Reykjavík city municipality election. These were the people who would decide over the destiny of the midtown harbour that had for some time experienced pressure to gentrify by real estate developers hungry for midtown land with views. I found it very interesting to have a functioning industrial harbour right in the centre of town, unfenced and open, and for some time I had wanted to make a film about it. The harbour played a peripheral role in my middle-class life; I knew little about the history of the town and the harbour, or what was really going on there. I found it beautiful with its exotic material qualities, and its position as an outsider made it even more desirable.

What had stopped me from making a film was what I perceived as a lack of focus if the film wasn’t just going to become some romantic collage. Then a vague idea started to develop. A few years earlier, while frequently spending time at the artist bar Sirkus in downtown Reykjavík, I had heard stories about the unbelievably difficult manual tasks carried out by workers at the harbour. They unloaded and loaded the large freezer trawlers that had taken over from fisheries as large fish factories at sea with giant freezer compartments kept at –35°C.4 Many male artists seemed to occasionally work at the docks when extra hands were needed. So I decided to check out the world of the dock workers. I already found it interesting during this initial stage that while the job of a fisherman had been idealised (in the pre-corporate times) in Icelandic culture – as evident in the many songs about the dangers of the northern seas – the job of the dock workers, who unloaded the ships under life-threatening circumstances, went unnoticed, and was even
scorned. I found only one song about a dock worker. It tells of the retired sail- boat fisherman Gvendur, described as a somewhat odd figure who liked to wear himself out with work rather than enjoy the company of women and wine. In addition to living as a hermit and keeping sheep, Gvendur labours
day and night every day of the week, unloading the ships when they come in. The song later relates how Gvendur’s exhausted bones lie somewhere in a lost grave. He is certainly not a hip guy, not even a tacky old hero, so it’s no wonder the whole aesthetic of the industrial harbour and manual labour was not something the new creative class felt any connection to.

To get an insider’s view, I contacted an ex-employee of the Sirkus bar, Hinrik Thor Hinriksson, who also happened to have worked on the docks for sixteen years, of which five were full-time. He was about to quit dock work in order to become part of the creative class. Having recently enrolled at the Iceland Academy of the Arts to train in the art of performance, he was more than ready to develop a script for a documentary with me.

While in the company of the dock workers that spring, it became ever more apparent how much the harbour had changed over the past years. I saw how the traditional row of bait sheds and buildings had been transformed into offices, trendy ice cream shops and cafés, restaurants, art galleries and studios, and designer shops. I learned that the craftspeople and small businesses servicing the fishing industry were being forced out by high rents following a lift on the ban on businesses outside the fish industry renting space in the harbour.5 Later, I discovered that it was not only because of the higher rents but the complaints of the office workers who were having a hard time with the industrial sounds of staple guns from the industries below during their important meetings. For tourists longing to hear these sounds, an old administrative building in the harbour was being transformed into a tourist hotel, hunched over the shipyard for guests to view labour at close range while sipping cocktails. The pier next to it had been taken over by a row of newly-built sheds, with large advertising signs offering services to the tourists looking for some action. Whale-hunting vessels lay beside whale-watching vessels, while the products of the sea – presented in a hip and trendy way – attracted a curious urban middle- class nostalgic for fresh Icelandic seafood. The transformation of Reykjavík harbour was remarkable.

Looking back, I find it strange that I did not connect directly the experiences and observations I made in Reykjavík with the research I had started in Bíldudalur. What was going on in Reykjavík’s mid-town harbour seemed to be happening on a different planet, or rather, I regarded what I was doing in Reykjavík as belonging to a completely different project. It was only later that I began to see the film and my project about harbour towns as being part of one large art research project.

THE CAMERA IS STATIC WITH A VIEWPOINT OVER THE SHOULDER OF THE ARTIST. THE ARTIST IS SITTING AT A DESK AT HER STUDIO IN BERLIN-PRENZLAUER BERG. A BRIGHT LIGHT FROM A COMPUTER SCREEN LIGHTS UP THE DESK. ON THE SCREEN WE SEE A PICTURE OF THE CONVEYOR-BELT PERFORMANCE. THE PHONE BEEPS.

In the autumn of 2010 I spent a long time in my studio in Berlin looking at the material I had collected in Bíldudalur and reflecting on what it and my interventions represented in my artwork. It was during this time that I started to think of my research as a project in its own right. The video I shot at the fish factory and the photograph I shot in the shop in Bíldudalur was especially interesting to me since it documented a stop on my journey. Until then, I had been exploring the relationship between my childhood memories and the fishing village through observations, self-reflection and walks, during which I took photographs and shot documentary videos. With the video at the fish factory I had done something different. I had realised an art work. I had taken the role of the ‘artist as ethnographer’; but I had not only assumed it, I had played with
it and turned it around. According to Hal Foster, who discusses the concept of the artist as ethnographer exhaustively in his book The Return of the Real (Foster, 1996), it is a common practice in contemporary art to draw upon the methods and methodologies of cultural anthropology and ethnography to conduct research that involves the ‘other’ (e.g. workers, villagers and so on) or to create a situation that can serve as a starting point for the exchange of knowledge and skills.6 And that is how I started: I exchanged the fish in the factory with consumer goods and donned the dress of the local workers to create a performance. I assumed the role of the artist as ethnographer, visibly disturbed the situation I was supposed to document, and on top of it all, I presented it in the role of one of those intended to be the object of my research. At that time, I began a diary, writing down the names of the people I spoke to along with my observations.7

My contemplation was also influenced by my initial introduction to the discourse around art-practice-as research. Earlier that year, I had attended an international conference on artistic research at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, organised by PhDarts (Leiden University Academy of Creative and Performing Arts and Royal Academy of Art) in collaboration with the Institute for Practice-based Research in the Arts (IvOK) of the K.U. Leuven Association. I received my very first reading material on artistic research, and it was by listening to the discussion taking place that I realised it echoed the concerns around the topic of marginalisation that visual anthropology had been tackling in the 1990s when I was a student. The use of the visual as a tool of representation and as a tool of research within academia has a long history.8 It seemed to me that many within the art field were unaware of this history, regarding academia primarily as a venue for text-based activities and struggling to imagine the role of art within that context. This observation
sparked thoughts about my own practice, which would take time to develop until the autumn of 2012, when I reached some conclusion on the matter. I was interested in the idea of viewing my practice as research in its own right, I wished to examine the landscape of my childhood memories through the eyes of the artist, what meaning I ascribed to it and what the artist could do about it.

W I D E - A N G L E D S H O T. C A M E R A PA N S A N D W E S E E T H E R E Y K J AV Í K A RT MUSEUM. THE CAMERA STOPS. LIGHT BOUNCES AND REFLECTS OFF THE SNOW. THE WIND IS HOWLING AS IT FIERCELY BLOWS THE NEWLY-SETTLED DRY SNOW IN ALL DIRECTIONS.

In February 2011, I showed art works-in-progress based on my research in Stockholm at the Supermarket Art Fair, the first time I showed my research in public. I exhibited both the video clip shot at the fish factory in Bíldudalur and a large photo collage based on selected research photographs taken in the kitchen of the unloading company. These were snapshots of photographs depicting the scars and tattoos of the dock workers. Two weeks earlier, I had exhibited the Hops Hopsi installation at the Reykjavík Art Museum with a group of five installers and builders from Berlin. I had taken a huge financial risk to make the exhibition possible but was positive about receiving an artist salary stipend that would cover a part of the costs of the exhibition, the Supermarket participation, as well as other exhibitions that year. However, in Stockholm I received the news that my application had been unsuccessful, which was not only hugely disappointing, but left me in financial debt. I was forced to drop my participation in any other exhibitions that year and withdrew into my studio in Berlin to contemplate how I could continue.

As reflected in a grant application I sent to a local, privately-owned Icelandic fund, I now wanted to continue shooting videos in Bíldudalur and the neighbouring village of Thingeyri in order to create several longer video works for a multi-channel video installation. I had received an invitation from the Kalmar Konstmuseum in Sweden for Spring 2012 where the videos were to form an integral part of a solo installation with the title On Deck. In the funding application, I described at length the longer video and presented my working methods. I never received an answer from the fund, but it was the first time I described what I was doing as art-practice-as-research. As documented in the texts that I wrote during that time, most of them written as part of funding applications, I also began to think about how to leave behind otherwise familiar settings, to de-familiarise the familiar, which is important if one wishes to create a space for critical thinking and questioning. Last but not least, I began to develop a theory of found objects, and how they would change or even create landscapes and situations, and I wanted to use them as catalysts in an enterprise whose goal it was to look at the past and the future of a place from a position that is clearly
bound to, and influenced by, the present.

Reading through the application today, one can see clearly that at this moment I wasn’t concerned with the transformation of an Icelandic fishing village alone, but rather with the transformation of Iceland as a society – and indeed, with every place in the world with a similar history of fishing – and even beyond, to the urban areas many had migrated to. As the maritime anthropologist Evelyn Pinkerton points out in her essay on the ITQ system in the 2015 publication Gambling Debt. Iceland ́s Rise and Fall in the Global Economy (eds. G. Palsson and E.P. Durrenberger), the impact of ITQ privatisation and subsequent loss of access to fishing by a large segment of the population was really an abandonment of the centuries-old social contract between the state and the fishing-dependent coastal communities throughout the world where ITQ was widely implemented in various forms. The two major elements of the radical transformation that Pinkerton
describes are the loss of livelihoods and the loss of political power on behalf of the communities for self-organisation. In another study, Naomi Klein has considered this a form of theft.9 I wished to access the phenomena of these transformations through intuition and my own practice, and reflect upon existing methods and methodologies as part of my research. Funding was necessary to take it a step further and put the plan into practice. Perhaps not surprisingly, considering the local politics, my application was not
accepted, and when the Icelandic Film Centre gave me a wild card to submit a financing pitch at the Nordisk Forum in Malmö in the autumn of 2011, the path was set. I put all my thoughts elicited by the work in Bíldudalur aside and began to work on a film about the harbour in Reykjavík.

In the autumn of that year I gave birth to my daughter Zoé Sóllilja, and only six weeks later, I was back among the dock workers in Reykjavík harbour, carrying out research that would inform the script-writing process. I was using every opportunity to take the pulse on the narratives taking place around the harbour. I talked to everybody: the politicians making the decisions, friends and family members, acquaintances and random people I met on the streets or at their workplaces. I also followed closely the public discourse on a wider scale as reflected in mass and social media. I was particularly interested in how the people of Reykjavík perceived the work going on in the harbour, the workers, and the transformations affecting the place. It was during this time that I began questioning the dominant narratives, and I discovered that there was a very broad consensus among the urban residents that the transformation of Reykjavík harbour was necessary to ‘bring the harbour to life’, and even the language had been bent to this perception. The people of the city seemed to ignore that the harbour was not an abandoned place, akin to some industrial areas abroad that had been reanimated; on the contrary, it was functioning as the largest unloading harbour of fish in the entire country. When the rule that allowed only businesses that served the fishing industry to reside at the harbour ended – and the rental market of the harbour was opened up – small businesses were ejected to make place for tenants who could pay higher rents. City dwellers in general regarded these incidents as a desirable development (disregarding the eco-system of industry and service, which worked as one organism), and the actions of the newcomers as simply taking over empty spaces or making the area more ‘lively’. They seemed to have blinders on when it came to the labour being carried out in the harbour, especially the unloading of ships.

A little later, I stumbled over the book Fish Story by the artist and essayist Allan Sekula and found his writing extraordinary. It resonated with my thoughts. Sekula traces the transformation of the harbours and the disconnection of the middle class from the sea or dock life back to the containerisation of cargo, the result of a technical innovation pioneered in the USA in the late 1950s and which had exhilarating effects on a global scale. The sheer volume of cargo that could be shipped in a container was so much bigger
that it changed consumer patterns and, what is more important, induced a more international approach in the search for cheap abour. Land became as fluid as the sea, and the labour didn’t derive from the close community but from international migrant labour. The connection was lost. It was this development that
erased ports from the collective consciousness and thus changed the relationship between ports and the local communities. To have a harbour view became a privilege, while few actually knew anything about the harbour as a place of work, transportation and platform for the exchange between the classes. Allan Sekula’s findings shed a light on what is going on in Reykjavík. During the winter of 2011/2012, when I performed research in the harbour and script work in my studio in Berlin, I felt even more strongly that I was documenting a hidden world. I realised that the fascination of the creative classes with the harbour – its architecture, the rust, the feeling of abandonment and decay that it evoked, the colourful objects visible all over the place, the feeling of visiting the past – only reflected their inability to see that it was the labour of the dock workers that defined the aesthetics of the harbour.

S TAT I C W I D E - A N G L E S H O T. W E S E E T H E S T R U C T U R E O F T H E W O R K PROCESS OF UNLOADERS IN A FROZEN COMPARTMENT. HALF-DARK. THE IRRITATING SOUND OF A MOTOR RUNNING, INTERRUPTED ONLY BY THE THUD OF LANDING BOXES.

It was not until the autumn of 2012 that I revisited the research that I had been doing since Bíldudalur, and I soon realised that my focus had shifted. I had documented and exposed the ongoing transformation of an Icelandic fishing town using the methods of a visual artist, performer and ethnographer; I had also written about the ethics and aesthetics of dock work, collaborating with the dock workers, and now felt an urge to introduce the dock workers into the visual art context. Thus, I sat down and wrote a proposal for the Frieze Art Fair, explaining why I wanted to invite workers to mingle among their guests wearing full working outfits. I wanted to reverse the situation in the same way that I had reversed the situation in the fish factory in Bíldudalur, but have the dock workers do an artistic intervention. I wanted to show the tasks carried out by
dock workers, their movements as they performed these tasks as a single unit and as fast as possible, akin to an oiled machine, while avoiding anyone being killed or seriously hurt. I had experienced their daily work in the docks as a choreographed performance and their harsh working environment and mundane communication as if it were a piece of poetry. For me, they were artists and I wanted them to take on the role of the artist as practitioner in a new setting, essentially replacing me.

STATIC MEDIUM LONG SHOT OF THE ARTIST IN HER STUDIO IN BERLIN-FRIEDRICHSHAIN. THE ARTIST IS SITTING AT HER LARGE WHITE DESK. THE LIGHT IS DULL AND EVEN. VOICE-OVER CUTTING THROUGH THE SILENCE OF THE ROOM.

Now, one could argue that the collision of my work on the documentary and my plan to collaborate with the dock workers in the art context was the result of a lack of funding. However, it was more than a practical solution since I was genuinely curious to know what would happen if I narrowed down elements from the
film and showed them in a fine art context. Maybe I was seeking a way to exhibit the practices and movements I had experienced and observed on the docks; maybe I just wanted to play around with the material of my research. But I had definitely reached a point where I wanted to combine my work as an artist doing research and the documentary film as equal parts of one large art research project. In a text I wrote that year, I stated that from now on I would use every possible method to tell my story, be it performance art, video art, digital photography or sculpture making, and conduct further research on location and in my studio in Berlin. At the same time, I began to call this large art research project Keep Frozen after the instruction written on the fish boxes in the harbour of Reykjavík.10 I was happy with this title since the two words had ambivalent references, resonated with the origin of my journey, and evoked the mechanism of memory, nostalgia and visual sceneries. In September, I sat down and developed a
research plan for 2013.

HAND-HELD CAMERA. CLOSE-UP ON HANDS TWISTING A ROPE IN BRIGHT SUNLIGHT. THE WHISPERING NOISE OF BLOWING WIND.

After completing my research in the harbour of Reykjavík, shooting videos and taking photographs of the labour on the docks, spending time with the dock workers and observing the colourful leftovers of the fishing industry, I wanted to finish my film script and take up again my earlier research. But after Bíldudalur, I was aware that the transformation happening there was part of a global story. I therefore decided to spend the first two months of 2013 with my family in a different fishing town and travelled with them to Essaouira, a Moroccan town located on the North Atlantic coast of Africa.

Life in Essaouira was very much about taking care of my children and cooking, which turned out to be an advantage because my participation in the local lifestyle made me go to the same places every day, buy the food the locals would buy, spend time with them, and overcome the otherwise problematic gap of languages and cultures. I went to the fish market every day, sometimes several times a day, to buy the typical ingredients for cooking: fresh fish, vegetables and spices. I learned that it takes four hours to prepare a Moroccan dish and accepted the challenge. After a few days, the only difference between me and the inhabitants of Essaouira was that I never stopped paying attention to their lifestyle. I continued to document my experiences at the fish market and in the harbour, taking notes, photographs and shooting video clips.

The harbour was filled with small fishing trawlers bringing in fresh fish that would be unloaded by the fishermen themselves, just like it used to be in Icelandic fishing villages. I could not only smell and see fresh fish here but also experience the unloading of the fish and everything that was connected with it. Once upon a time, Icelandic fishing villages had been like this: full of activity, colours and smells that make every village a vibrant place, business relations all around; people trading fish directly inside and around their boats and in the market; people making objects and tools for the fishermen, maintaining the boats, waiting for passengers and goods or just the mail. In the harbour of Essaouira, the crafts related to fishing were performed publicly, they had not yet been tucked away in closed buildings, far away neighbourhoods or foreign countries. The performance of labour in the harbour was authentic, not staged for tourists. This is worth mentioning because there was also an expensive fish restaurant in the harbour, furnished in the
maritime-themed decor familiar the world over and frequented by people who visited Essaouira for the day, walked around the harbour and had an expensive meal, just like the nautical-themed restaurants in Reykjavík frequented by tourists from around the world.

One day we drove down the Moroccan coast south of Essaouira to look at the beaches, and I noticed they were all covered with plastic rubbish. I was particularly fascinated by the colourful leftovers of plastic polyester ropes that were strewn all over the beaches. They are nowadays a common material for ropes in the fishing industry, were easy to obtain and simply slipped from the boats or the docks into the sea after use to be washed ashore somewhere. I collected some fragments of these ropes for later use and took
more photographs. My image archive was already huge but I continued to document everything I could see and experience, not only the objects related to the fishing, but also the people living in Essaouira and their daily activities.

STATIC CAMERA. MEDIUM-LONG SHOT OF CARDBOARD BOXES FILLED WITH PHOTO PRINT-OUTS AND PLASTIC OBJECTS. WARM AUTUMN LIGHT SQUEEZES THROUGH THE WINDOWS. THE VIBRANT SOUND OF A MOTOR ENGINE.

In 2013, things started to happen. I finished the script for my documentary and wrote a short treatment. Soon after, I began work on an exhibition of my research project following an invitation from Laura Arena (a former Dionysia resident, artist and graphic designer, and the founding director of the project space De-Construkt [projects] in Brooklyn, New York) to show the project at her space. The exhibition was supposed to be the first public presentation of Keep Frozen. How to exhibit the complex reality of a fishing town like
Essaouira, where the reality of the harbour seemed to co-exist with the reality of a tourist restaurant? How to exhibit the complex reality of harbour towns as such, which seemed to be defined by the labour of dock workers and fishermen but whose very labour was not visible to everyone, everywhere, to the same degree? How to exhibit the transformation of harbour towns? And how to exhibit an ongoing research project?

I looked at the photographs and videos that I brought back from my residencies and noticed a certain range of colours, shapes, movements and activities everywhere. There is an intense materiality about harbours, and I started a series of experiments to examine that materiality. I was especially interested in the colours: from the bright colours of industrial leftovers and the neon shades of warning signs, to the washed-out colours of old fishing boats, torn polyester ropes and rusty metal structures. The colours seemed to have the capacity to create all sorts of feelings: first of all, the feeling of ‘coming home’ and feeling at ease; then again, the feeling of disgust and shock. While the feeling of shock was probably connected to the fact that some colours were actually warning signs, the feeling of ‘coming home’ was more complicated. Initially, I thought it was provoked by the colours of the buoys that I had played with during my childhood, but there was more to it, and I came up with the idea that it was actually caused by something I would call ‘recognition’. The colours of the buoys had the ability to make me travel back in time and remember how it was to walk around in the harbour because the buoys were still the same. They had survived. They were a direct link between the past and the present. To put it in other words and quote from the insightful article 457 Words on Colours by Olafur Eliasson (Eliasson, 2001): ‘’The experience of colour is a matter of cultivation. As much as the senses and perception are linked with memory and recognition, our relation to colour is closely derived from our cultural habitat.’’11 In addition to a great deal of contemplation during two months of intense work in my studio in Berlin, there was also a lot of practice-based research. In April I bought transparent Plexiglas in different colours and laser-cut them into the shape of a buoy with the sup-port of an architect based in New York. The result was six buoy-shaped plates, 3 mm thick, tied together with a thick, twisted hemp rope to take on a three-dimensional buoy-shaped figure again. Then I played with it. I installed the object above a mirror and examined how the shapes and the colours collided on the ground. Then I hung the object up on a hook in the ceiling and shone a bright daylight lamp on it. The colours and shape were projected onto the white wall behind, creating temporary, washed-out coloured
drawings – something I replicated in New York.

I worked intensely on editing the video clips I had shot in the harbour of Essaouira to create one more art work for the show in New York. The clips took me back to Essaouira and reminded me that there was a good reason why many called this town the ‘Wind City of Africa’, and why the area was popular among surfers. I was particularly fascinated by the images of blankets and plastic that were supposed to cover cargo on the docks but which were constantly on the verge of being blown away; of further interest were the images of little rope threads that were dancing in the wind. They inspired me to start an experiment with the torn polyester ropes I had collected on the beaches and brought back from Essaouira. I learned on the internet how toxic these leftovers were; that they eventually did not only pollute the harbours but also the fishing grounds. However, I was not interested in taking on the role of an activist but wanted to expose the materiality of the small ropes and how they influenced the perception of harbour towns and leave the
rest to the audience. So I began to play with them, hammered nails into the wall of my studio, fastened every single fragment of them onto the wall, turned on the wind-machine that I had in my studio
and shot a number of video clips that I later integrated in the other video for my show at De-Construkt.

It was at this point that I re-discovered the video I had shot as part of my research several years before, and realised that this video was actually the first work I had ever realised as part of my research. I decided to change its name from Conveyor Belt to Keep Frozen part zero. From now on, the focus of my research would be on producing works and exhibitions in order to begin a dialogue and share my research with the public. I sent out my first video as a response to a few open calls and packed for New York.

A SEQUENCE OF EYE-LEVEL LONG-SHOTS OF THE ARTIST DRESSED AS A DOCK WORKER. WHITE STUDIO BACKGROUND. LOW-KEY LIGHTING. CUT-IN. ICELANDIC MUSIC COMING FROM A RADIO.

I arrived in New York at the end of May with research material from my archive, the video about Essaouira, the colourful, buoy-shaped Plexiglas sculpture and plenty of ideas for a possible presentation of my project. The agreement between me and the director Laura Arena was to have a site-specific presentation that would integrate Red Hook into the project, which meant further research on location, and I was very excited.12 I had never been to Red Hook before; the only thing I knew about the place was that it had been an important stop for trade ships from the 1840s onward, just like Essaouira; that it had become the largest unloading harbour in the world around 1910 and that it had undergone a massive transformation in the late 1950s, when the bigger container ships needed deeper water and moved to New Jersey. I had read somewhere that around the time the container ships moved to New Jersey, the widening of a street, which then became the Gowanus Expressway, and the building of diverse entrance ramps connecting the Express-way to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel finally left the neighbourhood completely isolated.

Walking around in Red Hook quickly convinced me that everything I had heard or read before was true. Separated from the rest of Brooklyn and Carroll Gardens, the neighbourhood was indeed remarkably isolated from busy New York and had definitely developed its own culture. In the 1950s Red Hook was still controlled by the Italian and Irish mafias, and in fact, the TV series The Sopranos was inspired by what was going on in Carroll Gardens. I heard that some of the dock workers from those days were still alive, as were
some of their children, though it seemed impossible to meet any of them. The neighbourhood seemed desolate, especially the vicinity around the project space where I was supposed to live and stage my exhibition. It was located only five steps away from the old warehouses, which had fallen into decay. To make matters worse, or more interesting, I discovered that the majority of Red Hook’s inhabitants did not actually live near the harbour but in a cluster of blocks far away that had been built in the 1960s and was
then the largest project building (for the urban poor) in Brooklyn.

I began to explore the streets near the old harbour and the main thoroughfare, Van Brunt Street, which had been the service street for the dock workers until the late 1950s. Some of the buildings there had been renovated, there were shops and bars but very little that had to do with the docks. I noticed that one of the old warehouses at the end of the street had been transformed into an apartment building with luxury flats and a supermarket on the ground floor. The supermarket (Sainsbury) seemed very popular among hip Brooklynites who came driving down Van Brunt from other parts of Brooklyn. I did not see any locals, except for the newcomers who were interested in moving into a loft with a view of Manhattan, the financial district and the front of the Statue of Liberty. Wandering off Van Brunt into the side streets nearer to the water, I ran into a small fenced off container terminal. Through the fence one could see a dock full of containers. When I tried to approach the guard he did not seem happy to see me. He barked at me and I was scared, especially when I noticed he was wearing a gun. What was inside the containers? It was impossible to find out. No smell; nothing to see.

I was still seeking information about the dock work and began to take pictures of the abandoned dock buildings and piers located between the main street and the Upper Bay. I had the impression that life in Red Hook existed in a strange limbo, between being a half tucked-away storage ground for off-duty buses and abandoned vehicles, and being some kind of place for hip new restaurants and cafés. On the first day, I had taken a picture of a sign outside a bar that read ‘Veterans of Foreign Wars’ and discovered only later on that this was the place where I could actually meet locals. I had taken the sign very literally and thought it was a closed club for members only, but it was here that I finally arranged a video-interview with an elderly man, Salvatore Maglio, in the garden behind the Veteran bar. In the interview, he told me how family life had been back then and what it had been like growing up as the son of a longshoreman in the pre-1950s era of Red Hook. In the end, he said I should watch On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando, the movie that was supposedly based on life in Red Hook but was actually shot on location in New Jersey. I felt like I was interviewing a man who could have been the son of a young dock worker in Reykjavík if he had not been the age of a grandfather.

When I walked around Red Hook at night, I always felt like I was in a TV show or a novel. The neighbourhood looked a bit like an ageing ‘New World’, and I thought a lot about the immigrants who had
come here a long time ago. The cars on the streets were remarkable. Big, old American cars like in the times of the mafia. I took pictures of them; just parked there on the side streets with the large Queen Mary passenger ferry in the background. It was a strange coincidence but two years earlier, I had been on the other side of the Atlantic where the Queen Mary docks in Hamburg, which is a container terminal still very much alive. Two old warehouses marked with big letters ‘New York Docks’ also caught my eyes. Magnificent buildings. One remained in a completely rotten state while the other was already being renovated for the yuppies. I took photos from both a land perspective and a river perspective, the latter from the vantage point of a water taxi that runs between Red Hook and Manhattan. One day, I found a building that was an old depot, full of ropes and objects that looked like they might belong to a dock. While I was very happy at first, I found out minutes later that it was the Universal Studios’ archive for props. It was hilarious. I felt relief when, a little later, I found a yellow, polyester plastic rope that had fallen off the pier, got stuck underneath it and was moving back and forth with the waves. I decided to shoot a video of that rope. A moment of recognition, maybe. Anyway, it resonated with my earlier research, and I picked up a similar rope lying on the dock for the upcoming presentation at De-Construkt.

W I D E - A N G L E S H O T O F A N E X H I B I T I O N S PA C E I N A N O L D WA R E H O U S E . E X H I B I T I O N G U E S T S P E R F O R M T H E TA S K S O F A W O R K E R . D AY L I G H T RUSHES IN FROM THE HATCH ABOVE. PAN AND ZOOMING INTO A CLOSE-UP OF A VIDEO PROJECTION SHOWING THE DOCK WORKERS IN ESSAOUIRA.

How to exhibit the complex realities of a harbour town? How to exhibit harbour towns in general? In Bíldudalur I had explored the dock materials and objects that were dispersed around the fjord, the fresh fish and guts, and the running blood that caused intense smells. At that time I had focused on the economic situation of harbour towns. In Reykjavík my attention had shifted and I concentrated on the ethics and aesthetics of dock work, the labour that was going on in the harbour, the rhythms and the soundscape
that accompanied it. Red Hook was the moment when I understood that the harbour towns I had visited so far were in fact all very different, each of them seemingly existing in its own time zone.13 They had only one thing in common: all had been shaped and were still shaped by harbour labour, even if this very labour was not discernible everywhere to the same degree. I began to develop a genealogy. Essaouira and the Icelandic fishing villages of my childhood memories were my starting point, followed by Bíldudalur and
Reykjavík as two places in the middle of transformation; Red Hook was the first and only harbour town on my journey so far in which the labour was not perceptible at all. The community seemed completely detached from the docks, and I decided to make these observations the theme of my show and create an event that could serve as a starting point for a dialogue with Red Hook’s community about the (almost incredible) past and a possible future of their neighbourhood.

I worked on the setting for the event during the entire week that I was in Red Hook, using the video and the buoy-shaped Plexiglas sculpture that I had brought along with me from Berlin, the tiny fragments of ropes that I had collected between Essaouira and Agadir (and also depicted in the video), the rope that I had found in Red Hook, bandanas that Salvatore had given to me and seagulls made of plastic.14 The project space was located in an old and rather large (approx. 70 m 2 ) warehouse space. When I had finished my work, it was filled with colours, small objects and large projections. I used a white-washed brick wall at one end of the space as a screen to project the video onto. The video was about the labour that defined Essaouira, showing the dock workers in the old harbour at work. A continuous and irritating noise of a run-
ning motor engine came to dominate the entire exhibition space.

I also displayed the rope fragments by fixing them to the walls, and casually placed the yellow rope from Red Hook on a rod sticking out of the wall, high up in the hatch opening at the centre of the space. The rope served as an invitation to the audience to do what dock workers do when they fix the anchor of their ship or pull a boat closer to the pier. Last but not least, I became part of the event insofar as I gave tours throughout the entire evening dressed as a dock worker, pointing to the fact that this was not an exhibition or event that would remain open for a couple of weeks. My idea was to invite each and everyone in the audience to experience the act of doing research themselves and to enjoy the intense materiality of a different harbour.15

WIDE-ANGLE SHOT. THREE ROLLS OF METAL CHAINS. AN UNUSUALLY LARGE PUFFIN HEAD TURNS UP BEHIND THEM. CLOUDS OVER REYKJAVÍK. PLAYFUL ELECTRONIC SOUNDS OF A COMPUTER GAME.

The event in Red Hook was the first public presentation of my project and the starting point for a different kind of research. My attention shifted to the issue of how to exhibit or present my research in public. Fortunately, I did not have to wait too long before I got the opportunity to deal with that question and work on a different presentation of Keep Frozen. Soon after my return to Berlin, I received an invitation from Thoka, a gallery in Reykjavík, to set up a Keep Frozen exhibition in the Spring of 2014 at their space in midtown Reykjavík. After several failed attempts16 to present Keep Frozen I was of course very happy about the invitation, even more so when I learnt that the exhibition would be featured in the annual spring
programme of the Reykjavík Art Festival which focused on artistic processes that year.

In late summer I received more good news from Iceland. The first-ever public art production grant fund, Icelandic Visual Arts Fund, had finally been founded and was now accepting applications. I seized the opportunity, was successful and received a grant for preparing a book publication based on the research. I had not kept a log book as I never thought it would come to this; the autumn thus became very hectic. For one and a half months I sat at my desk, searching and putting together information that I had stored on hard-discs, computers and in calendar books, to find a structure for the material I had been collecting, covering hundreds of objects, research notes, funding applications, video footage and research photographs. In November 2013 the Nordic Culture Point informed me it would eventually support the publication of the book; in December the Icelandic Visual Arts Fund followed with a production grant. However, things were a bit more complicated because the question now was if I would receive an artist stipend from the Artist Salary Stipendium, which would cover my living expenses while working. I waited patiently for the answer, knowing that it was quite common to not receive an answer before January / February. This waiting time was to be expected and I had long intended to use those harsh winter months of November 2013 – March 2014 for shooting the documentary about dock work in Reykjavík. I was in the midst of shooting when I finally received a negative answer, which meant delaying publication of the book.
I also had to find solutions for how to fund work for the Reykjavík Art Festival exhibition.

Working on the full-length documentary and my exhibition for the Reykjavík Art Festival at the same time was very challenging17 but produced some interesting results. I had become aware that most of the dock workers perceived the specific materiality of a harbour, the ships and the wooden piers, the warehouses and the tools of dock work, as a part of their life. Conversely, the majority of visitors, mainly tourists and creative folks like me, would rather regard these as things from the past. Many viewed the harbour with a
feeling of nostalgia. I wanted to address this issue in my exhibition. But how to expose the materiality of the harbour as experienced by the dock workers in a fine art context? Might the people react to a representation of the harbour and the piers, or even a found object, in the same way they usually react when they see the harbour itself? How to create a situation where the Reykjavík art audience would understand that it was a result of their way of looking at the harbour as though it were an abandoned place? It wasn´t really a challenge to explore the harbour through their eyes; this was a way of seeing I had shared with them. Finally, I shot a video with myself in the role of the artist as a puffin,18 an image loved by
tourists in Reykjavík; the puffin, moving around in the harbour just like the tourists and creative folks I had observed before. But this was not the only art work I developed for the exhibition at Thoka gallery. I also borrowed brightly painted rusty iron segments that I had used as props in the video and decided to display them on the floor. Another new addition in this part two was three C-prints depicting me dressed as a dock worker, performing the movements typical of such a worker while exposing the fact that I am an artist,
not one of them. The photos were taken in a photo studio in Berlin, inspired by photographs taken in the 1970s by the artist Sigurdur Gudmundsson.19 It is worth mentioning here that I chose to display the photographs in very material frames made of used wood in an extremely deteriorated state; wood that had been used to build the harbour one hundred years previously and was then dismantled when part of the Reykjavík harbour was deconstructed.20

CLOSE-UP ON THE ARTIST GIVING A SPEECH. A DOCK WORKER IN HIS WORK O U T F I T S TA N D I N G I N T H E B A C K G R O U N D . U N D E F I N A B L E L I G H T. M E TA L RODS SLAMMING TOGETHER, SEAGULLS SCREAMING, POEMS ABOUT DOCK WORK BEING RECITED.

At the invitation of the Reykjavík Art Festival, I went ahead and realised one more art work. I seized the opportunity to realise my idea of a performance by and with dock workers who would appear live in front of an art audience. I asked Hinrik Thor Hinriksson (my co-script writer for the film), who had just graduated
as a professional performance artist from the Art Academy, to collaborate with me on the realisation of my idea of having the dock workers attending the opening in their working clothes. I wanted Hinrik to add something else and respond to the theme of subverting roles, akin to what I had done in the C-prints that were part of the installation. So Hinrik, who is also an aspiring poet, developed the idea to have the crew read out poems which he had written about the everyday materiality and reality of the docks. I thought this was a clever way to confront the audience with the dock workers’ perception of the harbour, an audience that would almost certainly mostly consist of the cultural elite visiting the opening of the art festival.

Looking back, the exhibition was an experience for those who showed up. But the question that still remains is: why does our generation find it so beautiful to visit industrial zones, which they declare abandoned,and then react to them with feelings of eerie loneliness, and even nostalgia. Even if something is not new, it does not mean it no longer exists or is not part of the here and now.21 In the exhibition, I tried to show how alienated our generation actually is; how little we know about places that are central to the city, such as the harbour. The puffin in the video appears fascinated but constantly loses focus on the objects or structures that are being examined. Perhaps because the puffin doesn ́t understand its significance, it does not see the people, the work, the actions, only the architecture and the objects, the view, the rust, the colours. For the puffin, the area is first and foremost a playground, a beautiful location for its leisure. It plays around and finds outlets for its material fantasies. It is like porn.

ZOOM OUT, FOLLOWED BY A SINGLE LONG SHOT OF THE ARTIST SITTING WITH HER COLLABORATOR IN A TINY BERLIN STUDIO APARTMENT. A TYPICAL GREY BERLIN WINTER SKY. THE SOUND OF TWO MOBILE PHONES RECEIVING MESSAGES AND EMERGENCY VEHICLES.

Judging from a study on the audience reception22, the dock workers’ performance not only caused bewilderment among those who did not expect to meet such figures at an exhibition opening; it also
confused those who thought a dock worker’s perspective was of little relevance. Why listen to a dock worker presenting live what he thinks and feels about his work place at the opening of an art show? Very few actually understood that the performance was only half of the story; the other half was the gallery opening itself. When Hinrik and I conceived the dock worker’s performance, I wanted it to take place at the beginning of my show to highlight that the gallery opening was no more real than the work going on at the harbour.

It was and still is part of my research to assume different roles and call into question traditional exhibition formats and art institutions. I embraced and turned around the role of the artist as ethnographer in two of my works, the performative video Keep Frozen part zero and the event Keep Frozen part one, posing in both as the artist-ethnographer and the object of my research, as the observer and the observed at the same time.23 In Reykjavík I had reached the point at which I realised it was time to talk about the working conditions of artists and of creative labour in general, and about the artist as worker. Inspired by this thought, I had asked Hinrik to collaborate with me, knowing that most of the dock workers do not have con-
tracts but are ‘free’, just like artists. However, dock workers at least knew about unions, while artists are only now beginning to discuss how unionising could actually help achieve better contracts with museums and art festivals, or help them become more respected by society.24

For me, the concept of the artist as worker seems to be a useful term, not so much because it describes the role an artist should or could adopt if he or she wants to take a position with regard to political and social developments. It seems the most fitting term to point out the fact that creative labour nowadays happens under similar conditions and is accompanied by similar ideologies as the hard physical labour of dock workers.

The transformation of harbour towns has to be considered a global phenomenon. I will continue to experiment with how to exhibit Keep Frozen in such a way that the presentation speaks to both locals and a global audience. I intend to create an exhibition that can be realised in as many different places as possible, yet without losing its focus. I plan also to screen the documentary at international film festivals to reach an even wider audience. And finally I hope to find a wide readership that will read, rewrite, translate
and perform this book in as many contexts as possible. Thanks for reading.

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MARGINS TO THE TEXT

Hops Hopsi (2010), a mixed media, 10-channel video installation, was first exhibited at the project space PROGRAM (directors Carson Chan and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga) in Berlin between 21 January – 20 February 2010 with a production grant from the Stiftung Kunstfonds. Lazaridou-Hatzigoga was both the curator and producer. Hops Hopsi was exhibited a second time as the 19th part of the D series at the Reykjavík Art Museum between 20 January – 27 February 2011, curated by Yean Fee Quay. The installation borrows its title (an idea that originated with curator Lazaridou-Hatzigoga) from the names of two clowns (Hops and Hopsi) who were once key characters at the amusement park, abandoned since the turn of the last century. In the work, the dream world of socialism’s past became a distorted mirror held against the artist’s native Iceland, which had gone bankrupt three years earlier. In the videos, a heroic character from an earlier artwork. Don’t stop me now. I’m having a good time (2007) reappears in the work to enforce the allegorical narrative.

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Don’t stop me now. I’m having a good time (2007) is a sculptural piece whose title refers to a title of a TV advertisement made for the N1 gas station chain and that ran on Icelandic broadcasting channels throughout the year that the Icelandic state officially went bankrupt. In the advert, the song by the popular band Queen plays over a series of images of people having a good time. What was particularly sarcastic about this advertisement was that at an earlier date, the managers of N1 had been found out to be involved in illegal price fraud. The sculpture was a monument to what was then the new Icelandic hero: the corporate manager. It was a figurative piece which depicted a young corporate Lucky Luke riding his metal horse in victory. For me, the owners and directors of the N1 company were the particular embodiment of the pre-bankruptcy moral of the financial and corporate sector, which spilled over into the values shown in that advertisement. A few months after the art piece was exhibited, the whole thing crumbled and Iceland was declared bankrupt. A surprise to the general public.

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The Individual Transferable Quota system or ITQ was implemented by the Icelandic government in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following a decline in fisheries. It changed access to fisheries, which went from being an open resource available to anyone to being restricted to the holders of ITQs, who could catch and transfer the privilege of catching a certain share. ITQs were allocated to boats based on their history of catches, and thus the access to fishing became private property that could be bought, sold and leased, even away from the community, in the name of streamlining and profits. The devastating results for Icelandic fishing villages can be compared to what happened to the UK’s coal mining communities after privatisation, which also took place in the 1980s. Artist Jeremy Deller has done some interesting work on this issue. Professor Evelyn Pinkerton, a maritime anthropologist, stresses in her essay on the quota system – published in Gambling Debt. Iceland ́s rise and fall in the global economy (2015 ed. G. Pálsson and E.G. Durrenberger) – that the implementation of ITQs played a central part in the economic meltdown two decades later.

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Bíldudalur, like most other fishing villages in Iceland, became a village around the turn of the twentieth century. With its natural harbour conditions and proximity to fishing grounds, Bíldudalur had been an important seasonal fishing centre for the farmers and a trade port, for both the monopoly of the Danish colonialists and – from the late eighteenth century onwards – an international and new class of local tradesmen of fish, especially for the export of salt fish to Spain. Icelanders were suspicious of living off the sea and lived mainly as poor peasants and homebound workers who were ‘owned’ by the small farmers they worked for. It was not until 1894 that a ban was lifted and the workers could decide where they lived. Many moved to the old trade and fishing ports. Bíldudalur grew fast, and with 20 ships, a newly-built harbour and a thriving salt fish and herring processing plant that provided work, it was already by 1901 a village of around 300 inhabitants. Fishing very quickly became the main source of income, and a new class
of free fishermen and fish workers was born. Fish became the culture. Sundried and salted fish from Bíldudalur were a delicacy in more refined places in the world. Bíldudalur is the village my maternal grandmother moved to during WW1 at the age of 2. She was raised there before being moved to Reykjavík as an orphan at the age of 14. In 1936 the municipality built the first fish factory, followed two years later by another factory specialising in canned fish, shrimp and caviar for export. By the mid-twentiethth century, the number of inhabitants had risen to 500.

In the 1960s the factory started to can green peas with labels designed by the Swiss/German artist Dieter Roth. Due to Icelanders’ odd love affair with canned green peas as part of their ‘traditional’ Sunday lamb roast meal and the symbolic value as an Icelandic staple, the peas and the town were immortalised in 1983, a decade after the factory was closed, when a pop song titled ‘Bíldudalur green peas’ became a hit on national radio. Around the time that the pop song hit the radio, the government, following a decline in fisheries, imposed the notorious system of privatised fishing quotas or Individual Transferable Quotas, and in 1992 the village’s three fishing vessels and the fishing quota bound to them were sold off. The next two decades were characterised by a struggle to keep the fish-processing factory open with the help of small-boat fishing. When I went there in 2010, the number of inhabitants had declined to 166 and the old can factory building had become a monster museum designed to attract tourists to Bíldudalur. In spring 2013 the fish factory was sold as a storage space to a locally-owned salmon aquaculture company. Once a year, the village celebrates its existence with a festival called ‘Bíldudalur green peas’, a patriotic reference to the
canned peas.

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Reykjavík began in the nineteenth century to develop from being a trading port with few fishermen and trading houses situated close to a natural harbour to becoming a small administrative town, with the first
mayor of Reykjavík put in office in 1908, several decades before Iceland enjoyed independence from its colonial masters. The first task became the building of a harbour, located at the wooden piers and port houses. Reykjavík harbour was mostly complete in 1917, enabling large ships to moor in the middle of town. The existence of the harbour caused a fishing trawler revolution in Reykjavík, which, along with the massive
construction work that accompanied the building of the harbour area throughout the middle of the twentieth century, supported substantial urban growth, making Reykjavík by far the largest town in Iceland and the centre of commerce. In the first decades, most people lived within walking distance of the harbour, which was the centre of life with most people having some daily errands to run in the area. With the arrival of cargo ships, the unloading of large freight vessels was moved to what was then (1968) the edge of town.

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Essaouira is a fishing village on Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Its roots as a trading settlement can be traced to the time of the Phoenicians, and it has throughout the centuries been an important international trading port with European countries fighting for the locality. The island Mogador, just outside the harbour, creates a shelter for the strong marine winds the town is known for, thus making for natural harbour conditions. Essaouira today is a mid-eighteenth-century fortified town and has a port that was built by Alawite Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdellah, who wanted to strengthen commercial relations with the outside world. A major part of the town plan was the four markets; fish, spices, grain and general goods. Essouira also has an old slave market. The new port was called the ‘Port of Timbuktu’ since it was a key part in the trade route from Timbuktu to Europe and America, connecting Sub-Saharan Africa with the rest of the world. By the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth, Essaouira was Morocco’s principal port and a major Atlantic commercial centre. The medina (old town) is a UNESCO world heritage site, and the fort and the medina served as a background for Orson Welles’ 1952 film Othello. Indeed, the twentieth century saw Essaouira being a destination for the rich and famous of the European and American elites. By the 1960s, the hippies started to arrive, a move which has mutated into general tourism, with visitors on day trips from Marrakech.

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Red Hook is a neighbourhood of 11,000 inhabitants in the southernmost part of Brooklyn, New York. The village of Red Hook was settled by the Dutch as early as the seventeenthth century, who gave the place
its name Roode Hoek. Even then, the NY port was important in the triangular trade between Africa, Britain, Europe and North America. As in Essaouira, a military fort was built there in the mid-eighteenthth century. One hundred years later, in the 1840s, entrepreneurs were building ports in Red Hook, which became an ‘offloading end’ of the Erie Canal whose existence facilitated rapid growth: New York evolved from being partially farmland to the largest city and port on the East Coast of the USA. The canal opened up the interior of the continent, leading to trade and transportation development throughout the country and boosting industrialisation and manufacturing. By 1910, Red Hook was the busiest freight port in the world. It was the time of mass immigration of Italians, the Irish and Germans, who came to form a community and culture of longshoremen in Red Hook and along the larger New York port area. The era of the longshoremen was also the era of strong unions and the mafia. Some advances were made as regards
the rights and safety of longshoremen, but their communities continued to be poor. In the early 1950s, playwright Arthur Miller wrote a film script based on the community of Red Hook. When he refused to add so-called communists to the plot, he was sacked; with a new scriptwriter, the film developed into the legendary 1954 movie On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando. Due to the containerisation revolution of
the late 1950s, the unloading moved from Red Hook to New Jersey, where there were better conditions for a deep harbour and thus reception of larger ships. The Red Hook workers who belonged to the core
group received a life-long pension thanks to the ‘strong’ unions. With nothing to do, the ‘pensioners’ now hung about in the neighbourhood bars ona full-time basis, instead of just part-time. The neighbourhood
fell into decline, which resulted in its being called the crack capital of America by Life magazine in 1990. The remaining Red Hook container terminal is in operation to a limited extent, with the small area
being strictly fenced off. It is only in most recent times that Red Hook has been experiencing the process of gentrification, misled by the attractiveness of the nineteenth-century warehouses and the views.

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