When the Water Falls: Finding 'nowhere' in the precarious, poetic, and political waters of Iceland

WHEN THE WATER FALLS

FINDING ‘NOWHERE’ IN THE PRECARIOUS, POETIC, AND POLITICAL WATERS OF ICELAND

Text by Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir

The water tastes of the moss, the iron from the earth, it even has the scent of the sheep nearby. It can also be muddy, or milky; it is green, grey and blue, transparent like the sky.

When you travel in Iceland you see a lot of water, is the title of a collaborative travel book by Roman Signer and Tumi Magnússon, with photographs by Barbara Signer and Michael Bodenmann, first published in 2010. Their conversation moves as a travelogue, interrupted by sublime and picturesque views and intimate but abandoned interiors that seem lost and empty of people. Signer is astonished and impressed by the landscape, the ever changing weather, and the marvels they encounter during their journey through the highlands of Iceland, and its remote regions in the North East of the island. The prosaic yet different experience of water during the journey brings Signer to analyse the interconnection between his aesthetic experience and language. Water spurts and squirts and sprouts from everywhere “[...] and then suddenly, from out of nowhere there is a wild river gushing with water. A lot of water from everywhere. I don’t know where it comes from, maybe from a glacier or from a source.“ Signer and his travel companions would get soaked by the spray of a waterfall, submerged in the warm water of a natural pool, while cold rain poured down over their heads. The water is pure, clear, it runs through the green moss and is purified by the sand and the rocks.

Becoming a Landscape, 1992, c-prints © Roni Horn, courtesy of the artist and Gallery i8, Reykjavik

It tastes of the moss, the iron from the earth, it even has the scent of the sheep nearby. It can also be muddy, or milky; it is green, grey and blue, transparent like the sky. They discuss hydraulic systems and water pumps and the splashes and splatters while pumping water from a natural source in the mountains. Signer is seduced by the otherness of the natural environment, by the excitement and the aesthetic notions he encounters, feeling nature as a space “[...] surrounded by its harrowing loneliness.” He senses that “Nature here has such enourmous power. And it simply exists for itself. It does not need people.”

Similar notions of the sublime, as historically defined in the philosophy of aesthetics, are expressed by South Korean photographer Boomoon through his impressive, large-scale, fine art photographs. His images produced at the location of Skógarfoss Falls, in South Iceland, express greatness, force and the danger of water. He uses the camera as an extension of his perception. He describes it as “[...] a tool I use to maintain the breath of my creative spirit.” His large, close up prints showing the violent force of the falling clear water of the Skógarfoss waterfall, embody the impulse of the ‘dynamically sublime’. This can be paralleled with the expression of rational transcendence, famously defined by the American painter Barnett Newman who, in his search for pure art, described a particular emotion of sublimity “ [...] that will present itself to the viewer, in the hereand-now moment of the direct encounter between the physicality of the canvas and the spectator.” How ever, the ecstasy of the sublime experience is one that subverts order, coherence, and control and draws human kind into a reverie where borders are blurred between humans and nature.

“I think of water as a verb” says American artist, Roni Horn who, over the last 30 years, has searched for the identity of water. She describes her research as being “[...] something about the human condition — not the water itself — humanity’s relationship to water. So, in the end, it doesn’t make a difference what the water looks like. It will always have this kind of picturesque quality to it because that’s almost a human need — that water be a positive force.” Still, water as transparent, but ever changing material is the central concern in many of her photographic book-works, sometimes referred to as the encyclopaedia, titled To Place. She collects all the possible nuances and varieties either of transparent, cold blue fresh water coming from the mountains, the green, purple, geothermal water surging from a natural source, or the mysterious white and opaque glacial melt water deriving from one of the large glacial rivers that cuts the land sharp.

Horn, who has operated in Iceland for a long time and used the landscape “as an open-air studio of unlimited scale and newness,” describes her close relationship with the country “One of the biggest reasons for me to be here is the powerful influence of the landscape.” She experiences Iceland as the prime supplier of ‘nowhere’ in the world, and accordingly being nowhere is one of the most rare, vulnerable, precarious but wonderful experiences one can have. Her intimate, silent observations on the landscape are often based on existential, phenomenological issues on repetition and difference, as in the sixth volume of the series To Place: Haraldsdóttir (1996) that consists of photographs of Margrét, a young Icelandic artist, who Horn photo graphed over several weeks, always from the same angle, while she was immersed in water up to her neck, each time in a different pool. The changing light, weather, and water are reflected in the close-up portraits of her face, giving the name to the installation version of the series, You are the Weather.

In this series, Horn employs water as a way of gathering language around an image, simultaneously re-imagining her place in the world. Her phenomenological approach in her portrayal of the flesh and the face of the sitter is very powerful; the face of Margrét is pure, like a cosmic ‘body without organs,’ as defined by Deleuze and Guattari. They referred to a kind of virtual corporeality, marking a certain interrelation between aesthetics and ethics. But moving from Deleuze’s theory of difference and repetition, particularly relevant in the series You are the Weather, another reading of the work can be directed towards Astrida Neimanis’ expanded concept of hydrocommons. She has pointed out, in her article ‘Bodies of Water, Human Rights and the Hydrocommons’, that as “Our own bodies, which are primarily composed of water, elucidate the problem of thinking about bodies in binaristic terms as either ‘natural’ or ‘cultural.’” Neimanis proposes that “ [...] thinking about our amniotic relations to other human and more-thanhuman watery bodies can help us reconsider the rapid development of new hydrological technologies, water commodification and other stresses on our water resources.” She suggests “[...] that the promotion of a radically embodied hydrocommons might be better suited for negotiating the interbeing of bodies of water on this planet.” Her extended definition of hydrocommons (a word and concept which is generally used to describe geographical, industrial and economical networks of transport and storage) opens up indeed different possibilities of interpreting water in contemporary art, perhaps leaving behind romantic notions present in so many works considering nature.

The current global situation, along with problems of global warming, questions of sustainability, ecological crises, etc., readjusts our relationship to physical phenomena, such as water, which is interacting directly with surrounding physical and biological systems. The Icelandic artist Rúrí, deals with the future of global water governance and the increasing pressures on the world’s water supplies. In her monumental, multi-media installations, composed of images and sound of water, she questions the domestication of nature and its impact on water resources and nature in general.

Rúrí has been documenting waterfalls for more than two decades. Archive Endangered Water is an interactive media installation created for the Venice Biennale in 2003, comprised of 52 photographs of waterfalls that disappeared during the construction of a gigantic dam built for the hydroelectric power station Kárahnjúkar in the pristine highlands of Iceland, in order to supply an aluminium factory with electricity. The 52 photographs, each showing a different waterfall, are mounted between two sheets of glass and arranged as slides in slots placed inside a cube-like steel frame structure, literally forming a cabinet archive. When a photograph is pulled out, one can listen to the sound of that particular waterfall. In this work Rúrí exposes the precarious state of human nature relations and demonstrates literally how they are falling apart, carrying with them the planetary problem of water resources. By creating an archive, she attempts to reconstruct and file fragmented environments in order to recreate a different (art) identity through her documentation of waterfalls.

Threatened water is also the subject of her more recent work Vocal-VI, a multi-channel video with audio and voice performance created for Deep Space in Ars Electronica Center in Linz, 2012. A large waterfall occupied the space as it was projected onto a wall, while another projection aimed at the ground showed the surface of an industrial reservoir. Words literally flowed over the floor. The words were selected from different articles published on the internet. The texts were written by several authors, scientific and political, and offered a critical view on the environmental consequences of mega-dam projects, knowledge that often is silenced in public media.

Vocal VI, 2011, Multi-channel video performance with audio and voice, photographed by Marc Muehlberger © Rúri, courtesy of the artist

While you can read Rúri’s work as a critique on global capital and the hypocrisy of governments who, on one hand are selling nature for energy production, and on the other, promoting pristine nature as commodity for tourist consumption, the Swedish Hanna Ljungh approaches these absurdities in an idiosyncratic manner in her video, How to Civilize a Waterfall (2010). The work shows a furious woman trying to persuade a waterfall to follow her orders. Shouting and gesticulating, she makes a hopeless effort to convince the waterfall of the benefits of turning itself into a hydroelectric power plant. Ljungh’s work is a tragi-comic piece showing how humans are losing power at the end of the Anthropocene.

This paradoxical situation is quietly reflected in a permanent installation called Vatnasafn/Library of Water that Horn created in an abandoned public library in a small fishing town named Stykkishólmur. It is located on the Snæfellsnes peninsula, where many of the pure water sources spring from the ground and the glacier Snæfellssjökull camouflages its mysteries. With the help of a group of scientists and assistants, large blocks of ice were gathered from 24 of the major glaciers found in the island. They are now, with global warming, rapidly melting, and even the biggest ones will disappear in the near future. The collection of glacial water, melted from the ice, is contained in transparent columns which line the interior space, evoking giant test tubes reflecting and refracting the light outside. The installation is accompanied by an oral history archive of weather reports gathered from the inhabitants living in the area. The Library of Water also stands as a location and as a place for quiet observation and in this very same spot, regular monitoring of meteorological conditions in Iceland has been undertaken over the decades.

The Library of Water could be understood as a melancholic memorial of a place, and of identity of water. The displacement of observation, from the outside to the inside, is not innocent and is integral to recent development in technological climate control. “Politics from now on, will be a selection of the technology of climatecontrol”, claimed Peter Sloterdijk who is asking us “[...] to radically modify our point of view on what it means to inhabit a place.”

1 In Barnett Newman. Selected Writings and Interviews, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990, p. 103.

2 ‘Roni Horn. Water’, Art in the Twenty-First Century. Retrieved from https://art21.org/read/ronihorn-water

3 Roni Horn, Vatnasafn. Library of Water, Stykkisholmur, Iceland, Artangel 2007. Retrieved from https://www.artangel.org.uk/ library-of-water/journey-to-thelibrary-of-water

4 ‘I have always taken the weather personally’, Icelandic Art News, printed version, summer 2007, p. 27.

5 As discussed in Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir, ‘Nature’s Otherness and the Limits of Visual Representations of Nature’, in Art, Ethics and Environment. A Free Inquiry Into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, Ed. by Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir and Ólafur Páll Jónsson, Newcastle: Cambridge Scolars Press, 2006.

6 Astrida Neimanis, ‘Bodies of Water, Human Rights and the Hydrocommons’, Topia 21, pp. 161-182.

7 Bruno Latour, ‘”Air-condition”: Our New Political Fate’, Domus (868), March 2004.