Roni Horn opens a major work in a quiet fishing town on Iceland's west coast and a large exhibition of older works in the Reykjavík Art Museum.

Though living in New York, artists Roni Horn has had a close connection to Iceland, going back more than thirty years. She goes there to take photographs and has developed a large and highly original archive of works where the landscape and the weather most often have centre stage. Her first trip was made in 1975 when she had just finished her first art degree and since then she has travelled the country on foot, motorbike and car. Once, in 1982, she even spent two months in a lighthouse on a remote stretch of Icelandic coastline, just to ‘let the sea lie before me’.

She refers to herself, half-jokingly, as a ‘permanent tourist’ in Iceland, but her long association with the country has now culminated in a unique piece of published art, commisioned by Atrtangel and other benefactors, in the small fishing town of Stykkishólmur on Iceland’s west coast. Called ‘A Library of Water’, it is an installation, a documentary project, a writers’ residence, and a community centre for the town. At the same time, the Reykjavík Art Museum has opened a large exhibtion of her work entitled ‘My Oz’.

The Library of Water has received a lot of attention in the art press with major coverage in various newspapers and magazines. Jón Proppé and Christian Schoen of List visited Roni Horn in Stykkishólmur where the old library building, perched on a cliff above the harbour, has been transformed by the addition, inside the building, of columns of water, collected from Iceland’s glaciers.

Roni Horn: Artangel commisioned a work for Iceland – it should be placed in Iceland. What got me interested in Stykkishólmur was first the building, it started with the building and the rest grew out of that.

The title of the project is Library of Water and it is literally a collection of water, but it also and perhaps primarily a community center. There are two installations here by me, one is the library of water and the other is the rubber floor with words that refer to the weather. The idea is that we can preserve the water that comes from the Icelandic glaciers but we cannot preserve the glaciers. There will be a moment soon when all the sources are gone. Quite a number of the small ones are disappearing already and the larger ones will, too. They say it’s a matter of a couple of hundred years but I think it’s only decades. Especially the smaller glaciers; I cannot imagine that they will be here in another ten years. There are still a few small ones you can get ice from and it is a little bit of an occasion to get to these very rare sources.

The project is a work of public art. Absolutely. But it is public art that is totally under my control, not the public’s, by which I mean that there is no concensus process. I don’t have to make decisions with a group of people and compromise.

Jón Proppé: But you involve the people of Stykkishólmur in other ways?

RH: Yes, very much so. This is their community center in the sense that the place is organised to welcome the community to use it as they would best enjoy. One aspect of that will involve chess; we will be sponsoring a chess program here. We also sponsor a writer’s residency here and the people in the community will come up with their own ideas, anything from music rehearsals to yoga, I imagine. You can make a work like this – thinking of the archive – in a relatively controlled environment, such as a small community like this. I don’t know how something like this would work in New York City where you have a huge number of people coming and going. There I think you would have to go to the idea of a more private setting to control the use of it. But I think that in the scale of an event like this in such a small town can function in a pretty engaging way. People will be able to come here 24 hours a day and the the nights are especially beautiful up here and the columns of water glow in a way that is very satisfying to me, especially in the middle of the night.

Christian Schoen: You talk about control and public art. Will you be relinguishing controlling this work after the opening?

RH: To some extent. I pretty much hand it over to a group of locals from the community that will be determining the use of the building over time. So I actually have no intention controlling it on a daily basis or even a montly basis. My wish really is that the community will take it on – that they find it to be a meaningful presence in their town and use it accordingly. That’s what the point is, really.

Then there is another aspect of this program which is a collection of weather reports. It’s a publication, initially, but it is based on a website for which we have solicited texts and conducted interviews about people’s experiences of the weather. We’re receiving weather reports from around the country. It is about describing weather, not predicting it. It is a record of weather and the publication includes 75 individual reports, each individual can ranging from three sentences to threefour pages of storytelling, talking about the weather, talking about yourself.

JP: This part of the project obviously relates to the books of photographs you have published with images from Iceland, You Are the Weather, for instance. Is this perhaps the Icelandic focus in your production?

RH: One of the biggest reason for me to be here is thepowerful influence of the landscape. The presence of water is more coincidental, but it is pretty interesting in the work – it is something we discover or rediscover again, differently each time. I photographed the glacial river Skaftá many years ago. Every time I look at my archive, the glacial presence is there – even some fifteen years ago – it is something I wasn’t focusing on but felt attracted to consistently. When you think about this idea of an archive of water, it is so absurd, but it is also an endgame in a way.

JP: When I look at your series of photographs of water there is almost the feeling that there is an individuality, a character to the waters themselves.

RH: That is an interesting point. There are no references to what you are looking at in this building, it doesn’t say that the water in this column comes from that glacier, though you can get that information on the website. The fact is that it is one material, but it is also 24 different materials. It is up to you to distinguish, it is a question of what you are paying attention to. It is a perceptual thing and it is a problem for me to relate to an identity as a fixed thing, a whether a material or a person, these things are mutable in a very subtle way. With the water, you are constantly expanding the space, you feel the complexity of what appears to be the same substance, but is much more complex. You may come here thinking that it is all going to look different, but it doesn’t, it all looks the same.

Christian Schoen: Do you see yourself coming back here on a regular basis?

RH: No, I am kind of finished here, but it is actually an attractive place, the town, and I definately will be back, to watch the action, I keep my eyes on it. I am curious to see how it evolves, what kind of value it has to the community.

CS: How long is it now that you have be coming to Iceland to take photographs?

RH: Since the late eighties, mainly, but I first came here 1975.

CS: What do you say about the changes in Iceland?

RH: The new roads that were constructed in the mideighties
opened up a whole new level of interaction with
landscape and opportunities in terms of technology.
Now you have every kind of vehicle for coing around.
But the main issue for me is the relationship to international
business which is reflected in what has been done
with the construction of the big dam in the interior,
which will become a black spot, if it doesn’t become
something worse than a black spot, for the rest of
Iceland’s future. That is a whole new negative development
in my opinion. I see nothing positive come out of
it at all. It is mind-boggling that people are willing to
compromise the land here for five hundred jobs. And it’s
not as if you have no other alternatives. This describes
a profound lack of imagination.

JP: You have also gotten to know quite a few artist
here and followed the development of art in Iceland,
haven’t you?

RH: The art scene here has developed so much but it is
also dependent on the economy: The growth of economy
has been rapid and has given lift to the art community.
People ar very interested in art now, but the emphasis
is on economy, not on culture, or only on culture as
long as it is feeding the economy.

JP: How do you see this installation, this project, in
relation to the problem of conservation and the domination
of the economic?

RH: I think that if you can give people access to experiences
it increases the quality of life in a community.
This is about quality and community.