eyjafjallajökull — exercise no. 9

initial situation

Iceland is surrounded by a large sea and exposed to wind and weather and volcanic activities. But not only the island is exposed to these harsh conditions also people, animals and plants. The landscape changes persis­tently, being in a constant trans­for­mation process. The island is geolo­gically young. When on the way in the most different terrains, it makes you feel that the earth is just emerging under the feet and is boiling in the under­ground, in the rocky layers. Iceland's crustal landscape creates the impression of untouched nature. At the same time, the island has become a tourist magnet in recent years.
These conditions and contra­dictions of the island are an impulse to touch its 'skin', its surfaces and to move over its terrains. Arnold Häni photo­graphs on these explo­ration trips with the i-Phone when I move randomly around selected places. Some are touristic hotspots. Myself a tourist, I am not familiar with theses places. Intui­tively and instinc­tively I wander through areas diving into the topologies of abandoned places and impressive spots of natural scenes. We photograph when other people are absent.

movement | choreography

The postures and movements are peripheral and random, yet arising from an distinctly attentive bearing. (In-) directly I react to incidences of light, sounds and unevenness of the terrain. Depending on location and place, instictive states arise, I slip into the movements of animals: Fleeing, weathering, sneaking up, playing, keeping a low profile, yes, hunting, waving, swaying and swinging.
My wearing is a camouflage outfit: light brown trousers and a dark brown rain jacket, hood pulled over the head, underneath a blue-grey fleece jacket and wooly cap. Either a certain person nor a specific gender should be recognizable.
The changing landscapes and terrain are the protagonists. The camou­flaged individual serves as a vector directing the angle of sight in the vast and unfamiliar landscape.

photo and video project

Arnold Häni shoots many pictures of my movement explo­rations. As he can’t anticipate in which mode I will be moving, whether contem­plative or unpre­dictable and curiously bumpy, he has to react directly and shoot in quick succession. Thus he has only limited control over the pictures. We agree that he is choosing width, distance and angle of the photo­graphs and also never photo­graphing me from the front and not in direct alignment, always standing at an angle to me.

Later I put all photos into a sequence and transpose them to a film. While showing to Unnur s. Mjöll Leifs­dóttir, artist and employee at the Hafnarf­jördur Center for Culture and Fine Arts, I ask her to tell me afterwards, first in Icelandic and then in English, what the pictures evoke in her, what memories of places and spaces they trigger. I record both comments with an audio device. Together with other sounds her voices will follow the images in a polyphone composed audio-track.