Weather Reports You

COLLECTING THE REPORTS

We are heading back home from Stykkishólmur. My mobile phone rings, the nurse at the hospital passes on a message from the retired district commissioner, that he wants to add to his account of the weather –“The ship spun round full circle in the air and before dawn broke everything had been blown all over the place.” I thank the nurse, and imagine the commissioner in his room beside a German typewriter and the radio that broadcasts weather reports five times a day. A mosaic of countless stories about the weather takes shape before my eyes. A floating image of an unknown landscape that is nonetheless vaguely familiar, as if the stories about the weather create a false memory of my own experience.

Roni Horn asked my brother and me to interview people about the weather. Our father Ævar Kjartansson joined us, bringing with him many years of experience doing radio interviews for the National Broadcasting Service in Iceland. The idea was to create a kind of group portrait from the voices of Stykkishólmur and surrounding countryside. As if the weather itself could tell its story with the help of these voices.

It seemed straightforward enough as a proposition and my brother and I agreed to go into the field with a microphone and camera. Together we discussed how best to approach the collecting. We did not want to put together a list of the hundred most interesting individuals, or go on a quest to find the best storytellers. We preferred to drift around the area, from one person to the next, finding individuals interested in sharing their experiences by word-of-mouth.

So one cold, bright autumn day our work began. We walked from the harbour to the Skipavík building. The men there did not want to give interviews but smiled cordially and suggested we go up to the petrol station where men were sitting around who were surely waiting for a chat about the weather. We walked slowly, apprehensive about disturbing them with our disarmingly simple questions. It is strange to gear up to discuss something so commonly discussed, something so ubiquitous as well. Talking purposefully about the weather is like trying to run under a rainbow. All the men except one had already left when we arrived. Freysteinn Hjaltalín became our first interviewee. He described how the north-northwesterly wind turned north-northeast.

From the first encounter at the petrol station we wended our way through Stykkishólmur and out into the nearby countryside. We had to remind ourselves repeatedly about the assumptions: No, this isn’t a radio interview, this isn’t an academic study, it’s a portrait! But at the same time we were just ordinary visitors in regional Iceland, talking about the weather and drinking coffee, before we formally began talking about the weather and drinking coffee. Our father’s experience proved useful in the matter of the coffee – whether to start recording before or after the first cup! Can you recall any incident or period in your life when the weather played a major role? … Does any image come to mind in which the weather is in the foreground? … Does the weather have an effect on you? … Does it make any difference to you? … What kind of weather makes you feel good? … Do you think the weather has changed in your lifetime? … Have you ever been afraid of the weather? … It is difficult to open a conversation without letting it be guided by preconceptions about what is interesting.

The residents of Stykkishólmur and Helgafellssveit responded generously to our overtures. We were pleased they agreed to volunteer their voices to this collection, without fearing the weather would give them away! Maybe this was partly sympathy as we stood outside in the weather, looking for a conversation about something seemingly so close to nothing! And the divide between nothing and not anything is a slender one. If interviewees felt they were not delivering anything, not saying anything in particular, we could read from their faces a longing to add something. But since readers see no faces, they will have to make do with reading between the lines.

During the many months of making these interviews I learned something important about Iceland, about voices, about the weather, and about teamwork. I can’t say exactly what it is that I learned, but it’s connected with people’s different ways of dwelling on the moment, reading their environment and the people around them, living in the whirlwinds of memories and forgetfulness. The collection of weather reports is an archive of what people remember about the weather and about themselves, but perhaps it is an archive of what they have forgotten as well. What full-blooded male would recall being afraid of the weather at sea?

All archives are conditioned by time, by a certain blindness as well as vision. To complete this collection of what appears in this publication, we have been in a dialogue with Roni Horn’s concept for Weather Reports You. After we had collected all the reports, Bernard Scudder translated the transcribed interviews into English and Roni then edited the reports into the more concise testimonies gathered here.

On the way back from Stykkishólmur I remember the story of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, who travelled through Transylvania and elsewhere, collecting themes and snatches of folk songs and creating his own music from them. I wonder if the weather reports will become a kind of music for our children to listen to, as I hear persistent themes, insistent refrains, through the times and the weather.

Oddný Eir Ævarsdóttir

Selected Reports

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