I think the problem now in the Nordic countries is that analytical approaches to space are considered normative and very rigid. We have a strong tradition in architecture and also in urban planning which we could call intuitive, which means you don’t have to justify it by analytical means. Gradually, as I was beginning my work in Denmark, new people came forward to change that and promote the integration of analytical tools into a very sophisticated way of understanding space—sophisticated in that they did not compromise ethical values, ideas about social values and ideas about how grassroots movements progress and develop. What I was particularly interested in was that idea of taking for granted that the people using whatever you made had some expertise of their own, that they were not just neutral but rather had something to offer. The people who use it come with something and they give you something back. This is not a very Scandinavian notion, as the ideas that were being promoted until recently were much more dogmatic, saying that “This is the space and we will tell you how to behave in it”. The new ideas are different in that they hand over responsibility to the user.

The idea of expecting user and audiences to have expertise has a history. Here in Iceland the idea of democracy was implemented at Þingvellir—the place of the old parliament—and the old Germanic word Thing means controversy. This means that the parliament—is a place where different ideas and perspectives meet. From this we can derive ideas about public space as a kind of democratic notion, that it represents a sort of democratic idea of what a space is. But we must also remember that there is no such thing as a space that does not already have some sort of intentionally built into it, no space that is not already influenced by something. This means that no spaces are free and all spaces are political. That also means that when you want to introduce a work of art the situation becomes very, very complex. We have to take on the idea of what constitutes these spaces and the idea of the city itself and of the role of art.

In Stockholm I did a piece that illustrates some of this. One day, suddenly, people noticed that the river in the city centre had turned green. Members of the public asked the police and the police explained that the green pigment was used for tracing leaks and, furthermore, that the chemicals had been certified as safe by the authorities. The fact was that I had secretly poured the pigment into the river and the police knew nothing about it. So here was the police taking it upon themselves to calm people down in this very Swedish way and while I’m not saying that this was necessarily a very good work of art, the mechanics of it and the effect were certainly interesting.

Downtown Stockholm is an interesting place because gradually large parts of it have been preserved as a kind of museum and Stockholm, like many other cities, is struggling with the questions of how to balance history and the city. The same is true here in Reykjavík, where people are always asking if they should preserve the old houses or build new ones. In the end this is a question of how we see history, who has a right to history and who can lay claim to it. This in turn has a lot to do with questions of city branding and of the commercialisation of spaces, the impact of the market economy on spaces. What I think happens when commercial interests take over a space is that it takes away the temporality of the space. It becomes a place that never changes, an instant classic, immutable. Time is a problem for the market economy. Brand economy is counter to a lot of our ideas about succession, time and change. That was why I coloured the river, to remind us that there is a temporal element in the city, the river flows and time moves on.