RONI HORN

VATNASAFN /

LIBRARY OF WATER

STYKKISHÓLMUR, ICELAND

  • About
  • The Installations
  • Weather Reports You
  • Writers In Residence
  • Roni Horn & Iceland
  • Journey to the Library of Water
  • The Building
  • The Chess Room
  • The Publication
  • Press Coverage
  • information
  • Acknowledgements / Credits
  • Water, Selected
  • You Are The Weather (Iceland)
  • Glossary Icelandic
  • Glossary English
  • An Introduction
  • Collecting The Reports
  • Selected Reports
  • Acknowledgements
  • Introduction
  • Nominating Committee
  • The Writers
  • Biography
  • Work From Iceland
  • Writings On Iceland
  • Artist's Books
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IS Icelandic

Writers In Residence

Introduction

FRÍÐA BJÖRK INGVARSDÓTTIR
INDEPENDENT WRITER AND CRITIC

In my bookcase, Roni Horn’s books occupy a whole shelf. Soon I shall clearly need to provide another. Yet I only own a fraction of the books that she has published. Looking at the shelf, I notice that there are more books by her than by many of the best-known contemporary authors, which naturally sheds an interesting light on her as an artist.

Her books are of all sizes and types, some of them a little unusual from a literary perspective. Such as Another Water, although I have sometimes ranked it with the most experimental works of contemporary fiction about the state of the late-postmodernist human psyche. Others are much more familiar in the unusual treatment she gives to them –book designs for the German translations of the works of Halldór Laxness, for example.

Some of the books present her own texts, but many include the writings of other artists. These include philosopher Hélène Cixous, visual artist Louise Bourgeois, film director John Waters, and so on. Some of the authors are twentieth-century legends and household names, others belong to the specific world of Roni’s conceptual journey over the past fifty years – they are rarities in most senses of the word.

But my association with Roni is not confined to books. It would be more accurate to say that the conversations during our decade of acquaintance merge in texts rather than books. Although these conversations do not necessarily originate in texts, they almost invariably end in speculation about them. Texts chart our collective experience; different as we may be, we have lived the same life in the texts we share. Not literally, any more than when we witness the same event in “reality”, but rather as if our experience and mental reality overlap in texts independent of time, place or cultural background. Independent of language or visual experience.

I was astonished when I saw Roni Horn’s interpretation of texts by Emily Dickinson, in works that she names Key and Cues. She had managed to concretise the aspect of familiar poems/narratives that I had considered to be absolutely relative and abstract. To extract the meaningful thread of their content from the reader’s relativist inner world, into the material world. She had succeeded in visually identifying what I still have not found an appropriate explanation for in literary interpretations – and without diluting the force of the text.

The text, which had previously lived on a page in a book (in fact in Emily Dickinson’s own incredibly beautiful manuscripts for most of the time), suddenly sprang to life, leaned up against the wall and radiated the same subtle simplicity in its three-dimensionality there as on the page of my book before. The message was the same, but resurrected in a new dimension – in an intellectual sense as well.

In Roni’s drawings, which I did not see at close hand until some years after I discovered Key and Cues, the opposite happens. In them she starts out with paper, a pencil, colours and a knife. After countless cuts in the “manuscript” a narrative is created that could be read along, back and forth, just as if it were a text.

Bearing this background in mind, it is not only logical but simply necessary that the premises housing Roni Horn’s VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER be a refuge for those who write, or work with narratives or texts. The building’s history as a library – a centre for textual associations in a variety of senses – is not over. On the contrary, it will continue to evolve through VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER. Since literature forms the oldest and most continuous artistic tradition in Icelandic culture, it is an integral part of the national identity. In this sense, what is written in VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER is not merely a link with Roni Horn and her unique works, such as the series To Place, which revolves around Iceland, but also a link between Icelanders and their environment, and between people from other countries and Iceland.

A committee has been appointed to select writers to enjoy the hospitality of the VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER, comprised of filmmaker/musician Dagur Kári Pétursson and philosopher. Hjálmar Sveinsson, as well as myself. Roni Horn has also been involved in the dialogue and will act as a consultant with us, especially in the case of authors from abroad. We are unanimous in wanting to bring in people from as far and wide around the world as possible and from diverse branches of the arts.

Through VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER, we hope to create a collection of texts related to the authors who stay here. The aim is to make the works of each resident accessible to the general public, and conceivably other writings related to their work will find their way into the collection. Although no obligations are specified for the writers in residence, it is hoped that their presence and work at the library will create valuable connections, both in the town of Stykkishólmur and beyond it to the world at large. Connections which – like the water in Roni’s glass columns – have an age-old background in the collective global environment, and nonetheless find a permanent place at VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER.

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