“Big enough to get lost on. Small enough to find myself. That’s how to use this island. I come here to place myself in the world. Iceland is a verb and its action is to center.”
– Roni Horn
I know what you’re thinking, Roni Horn isn’t Icelandic. And you’re right, she isn’t, she’s American. She grew up in upstate New York and travelled extensively throughout Iceland from the 1970s onwards. In fact this shouldn’t come as a surprise, it is not very Icelandic to be preoccupied with Iceland. Of course Icelanders are proud of their country and even the most timid of them are patriotic, yet an artistic preoccupation with Iceland is more of a foreign phenomenon. In a way this is normal: what local spoke as warmly of Venice as Ruskin or of Rome than Byron? ‘Extraordinariness’ is usually the perception of an outsider, for the locals these environments are just their homes. Of course there are exceptions to this, some of the England’s greatest nature writers such as Wordsworth, Edward Thomas or Roger Deakin, were inspired by the locales they knew and loved. It was precisely because they understood their environments so well that they cherished them so deeply.
833 words a day 