Water. Weather. Willingness.
Iceland is a landscape in perpetual transition. A land of fire and ice where the weather plays its own mercurial character in the cultural landscape. It is a country that exists in its wholeness atop a cultural and tectonic divide - maintaining its own unbound identity against the polarizing influences of Europe and America. It is unpredictable and extreme. Unbound and formidable. Seemingly untouched but continually shaped by human impact.
I began dreaming up this trip as part of the 2021 WeGotNext Ambassadorship. Planning this trip gave me the unique opportunity to create an experience of Iceland using my two favorite means of engaging with the world: art and cycling. Art makes life more interesting - from curating exhibitions to designing bikepacking routes, this has always been the ethos behind my practice. Life is hard, so why not try to find beauty in the chaos? It is in these brief moments of awe and wonder that life takes form. And if we dare to look deeply, we can connect these points of light to create better tools for thoughtful engagement with the world around us.
Shortly after my grandmother died, the only grandparent I’ve ever known, our large family got together less and less. Without the matriarch to bring us all together people were less invested in traveling to visit one another and by the time I was in college the thread tethering me to my extended family got so thin I stopped feeling its pull all together. Coming into my queerness and navigating my gender journey further separated me from my family, not so much for anything they did really but more for what I feared they might do. It is only in recent years that I’ve begun reconnecting to some of my cousins, sharing stories of growing up together and all the family gatherings we once had. We missed them. We missed each other. So when I was invited to create a project for WeGotNext, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to experience a country that has captivated my imagination for so long while also reconnecting with my Icelandic family for the first time in 20 years.
And as a queer and trans person, and someone with a history of medical trauma, I’ve also always felt a visceral connection to the dramatic landscape of Iceland. It is volatile, constantly changing. Growing. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. I empathize with this heaving earth, the landscape of my own body cracked open and reshaped. There is a comfort to be found in seeing the broken earth of my being mirrored in the land around me. To recognize that while the terrain seems hostile, it can also be delicate. Teeming with bryophytes these so called barren landscapes are flocked with an ombré of mosses slowly stretching out over the rocks to make viable soil for other plants to grow. These stone eaters are a vibrant reminder of how slow the process of growth can be and how vital it is to support and protect that growth. So many aspects of my own body, my gender, my identity feel in alignment with the cultural and geological story of Iceland. A body of land strategically domesticated yet seemingly wild. A country that occupies a larger space in the human imagination than it does on a map.
I've been interested in Icelandic art and literature for some time now, an interest that led me to the work of queer artist and poet Roni Horn. Roni first came to Iceland in the 1990s during which time she would ride a motorbike around the island, taking in the landscape and camping out under subarctic skies. She fell in love with the people and terrain of Iceland. As an artist Horn thought of the landscape as both her studio and her material. Over the years she developed a subtle and responsive interdisciplinary practice that visibly tethered human experience to the land through a series of collective self portraits using everything from photography to oral histories about weather to glacial water samples. Ever the cultural critic of the Anthropocene, Horn was always seeking out ways to complicate and strengthen our relationship to the natural world. As a queer artist and curator I see so much alignment in our work and interests, so the opportunity to experience a place she loved so dearly using her own work as my guide really appealed to me.
In 2007, ArtAngel commissioned Roni Horn to create The Library of Water, Vatnasafn. Located in the former town library of Stykkishólmur, the building resembles both a lighthouse and an abandoned 1950s art deco gas station. Within its keep are a series of water samples gathered from around Iceland’s five major glaciers. These multi-ton human-scale columns of water distort and displace the viewer's gaze - inviting us to look at the world through a lens created by rapidly melting glacial waters. The work brings together the artist’s deep concern with weather, water, words, and identities. But the work isn’t desolate, it asks us to seek out new solutions for responsible living, describing the place as “a lighthouse in which the viewer becomes the light”.
My project with WeGotNext has allowed me to continue this ongoing conversation around the conditional relationships between bodies and landscapes. A conversation guided by the physical and conceptual aspects of Roni Horn’s work and the writing of other critics and artists like Rebecca Solnit, Lucy Lippard, and Eileen Myles. A route that physically links many of Iceland's major glaciers with arts spaces and coastal communities that have themselves been impacted by the ever-changing socio-economic landscape created by industry and extraction.
Art allows us to dream new worlds into existence, so why not use the same methodology for designing long distance bike routes? The more opportunities we have to meaningfully connect to the lands on which we travel the more deeply we are bound to them. It is in these moments of beauty and awe that the seeds of stewardship are planted.Through the practice of bikepacking I was able to draw a physical line between these sites to experience intersectional ideas around cultural composting, climate change, fluid bodies, weather, trans-species understanding and our willingness to see our part in the whole.
