Introduction

Journey to the Library of Water

JAMES LINGWOOD
CO-DIRECTOR ARTANGEL

My first experience of Roni Horn’s work was through her books of photographs and drawings and writings made in Iceland. And my first experience of Iceland was through these books.

I came across the first of these books in 1994. Pooling Waters has two companion volumes, one with a sequence of photographs of hot pots and swimming pools from around the island, and the other an extensive collection of writings inspired by the artist’s experiences in different parts of Iceland. Then I found a copy of Verne’s Journey, published a year later. The book begins with aerial photographs of a glacier, Snæfelsjökull, where Verne’s travellers began their journey to the centre of the earth, and eventually immerses the reader in the fury of a maelstrom.

The books are part of an ongoing work, sometimes called an encyclopedia, To Place. Each successive volume has the same cloth binding, embossed with the name of the place and the name of the artist: Ísland . Roni Horn

The books bring proximity to a distant place. They convey the quiet intensity and subtle energies of a long communion between an elemental island and a singular and passionate mind. They have something of the quality of a secular devotional, made by someone deeply committed to the uniqueness of the island, its geography and geology, climate and culture. They embody a relationship to the place that is both intimate and selfless – the very same qualities that lie at the heart of Roni Horn’s approach to VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER.

My first meeting with the artist who made these impeccable books took place a few years later in London, where Artangel is based. Roni had been working in the city on a series of photographs of the changing surfaces of the River Thames. There was brief talk about a project in England. But in time the talk turned from England to Iceland and the possibility of Roni making a public project there.

Initially, the idea involved something of a mental leap for both of us. For Artangel, since our sphere of activity had hitherto been projects for specific sites or situations in London or occasionally elsewhere in Britain, as well as film and video projects which could materialise in different places; and for Roni since she had kept the art world at bay from her island, carefully guarding the delicate ecology of her relationship to the place. For over two decades, Iceland had been for her “an open-air studio of unlimited scale and newness”, a place where she could lose herself and find herself and which she would share, through her work, with others at another time and in another place. Studio visits were few and far between….

Gradually the idea became a necessity. For Roni, it was an opportunity to conceive a place which could incorporate many of her abiding artistic concerns – with language and material, water and weather, reflection and illumination, the elusive nature of identity – and to offer something enduring back to the island which has given her so much since she first visited the island as a young arts graduate in the mid-1970s. For Artangel, the possibility of working in a different way, on a long-term project away from the centripetal forces of the contemporary art world, had undeniable attractions.

In the autumn of 2003, I visited Roni for the first time in her open-air studio. After a day in Reykjavík, we set off on a road trip together. Not far out of the city, where the disappointing suburbs had been left behind and the grandeur of the landscape had begun to unfold, I saw a rainbow and asked Roni to pull in so I could take a photograph. She confidently told me that we would see better rainbows and drove on. And we did, many of them, on that and subsequent days.

We drove west, towards the Snæfellsness peninsula where she had made the photographs in Verne’s Journey. We stayed in a turf-covered hostel, close to a raging sea. I saw lava fields with their infinite variety of greys and greens, dramatic waterfalls, and black mountains, every bit as striking as the books had suggested. I was introduced to the natural modesty and reserve of Icelanders, living on the edge of such an implacable landscape. And I experienced something that the books could only ever hint at – the intensity of the ever-changing light and weather and the imposing presentness of the place.

The next day we were heading up to Akureyri, on the north of the island, where she was installing photographs of the River Thames flowing through the University. We stopped en route in the small town of Stykkishólmur and visited the library on the hill overlooking the harbour and town on one side and the ocean on the other. The architecture of the library was distinctive and its situation at the high point of the town striking. Overflowing with books, it was nonetheless clear that the library offered beautiful views of the ocean and the constantly changing sea and sky outside.

Roni had heard that there were plans to move the books to another building in town. Not long after our visit, she introduced herself and some initial ideas for the library building to the Mayor of the Town (she wrote about “the most beautifully situated library in the world”) and not long after that, I introduced Artangel as an organisation committed to working with her and with the community to realise her ideas for a new life for the library.

At the heart of the initial proposal and the realised project was Roni’s idea to renew the building as a place both for quiet observation and reflection for community gatherings of different kinds. She imagined VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER as “a lighthouse in which the viewer becomes the light. A lighthouse in which the view becomes the light”.

Foregrounding the importance of the viewer and the light, Roni envisaged enlarging the windows looking out west to the ocean, and clarifying the space with the semi-circular windows looking over the harbour and to some islands beyond. She proposed to make a special rubber floor holding a field of words in Icelandic and English; the words, all adjectives, lying in wait for the visitor, ready to attach themselves to a mood or an emotion, inside or outside. The renovated interior would be available for exchanges of different kinds: chess classes, readings, community meetings. The basement was to be opened up and converted as a studio for writers, so the daily struggle of aiming language at experience would continue in the place where the books were once stored.

Over the next year, other elements of VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER were introduced. In addition to the field of words in the rubber floor, the building would house two other collections. A collection of water gathered as ice from some of the major glaciers in Iceland, formed many millennia ago and now rapidly receding; and an archive of weather reports gathered from people living in and around Stykkishólmur (coincidentally the very same place where the first regular monitoring of meteorological conditions in Iceland was undertaken by Árni Thorlacius in 1845.) The selection of water is housed, transparent and still, in a constellation of glass columns which flow through the interior, reflecting and refracting the light outside and illuminating the interior as it becomes dark. The collection of weather reports has been published as a book, is being serialised in the national daily newspaper Morgunblaðið, and will continue to grow in the years to come.

All of this of course necessitated journeys and meetings of many different kinds; a coalition of people in Iceland energised by Horn’s secular vision for a place of enlightenment. They were drawn into the magnetic field of Horn’s project from Stykkishólmur and the Snæfellsness Peninsula, from Reykjavík, London, New York and elsewhere. The realisation of the different elements of the project has needed the involvement of many people in Iceland and beyond. A chess grandmaster and a team of specialist glass-makers, ice collectors and weather reporters, writers and water consultants, the town council and the national parliament, advocates and supporters from many different parts of the world: people who talk about the weather in Iceland to people who make the weather there.

Not far from Stykkishólmur is the volcano of Snæfellsjökull where Jules Verne’s fictional travellers began their journey to the centre of the earth. In one of her many pieces of writing inspired by the experience of Iceland, Horn stated “I come to this island to get at the very centre of the world."

VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER offers a new centre on the edge of this remarkable island.

One stage in the journey is complete. VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER is open, to anyone, at the time of their choosing, on their own, or with others. With this openness, the next stage of the journey is just beginning.

Commissioned and produced in 2007 by Artangel with The Town of Stykkishólmur, The Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, The Ministry of Communications and the Icelandic Parliament.

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