(…) Speaking of the weather, this is or certainly was one reason to become a permanent tourist here. My status as permanent tourist, something I invented over the years of coming to Iceland, allows me the distance I need to be near it. For me, it seems my nearness to Iceland is something I can only have by keeping this distance. There was a point early on in my visits that I was so taken with this landscape I wanted to experience everything here. Every road, river, mountain and rock. When I was 22 I fantasised about retiring and doing a complete inventory of all the rocks. But short of that, I just went out. (…)
I developed an exquisite sensitivity to the landscape. Indoors I became anxious when I turned my back to a window for fear I might miss something. Especially on a clear cold night when there was a chance the aurora might perform. (…) The weather is an important thing in our life. It’s no longer simply an occasion for small talk. It is constant in its indifference to us and unpredictable in every other way. It keeps circumstance complex and beyond our final control. I think it is essential to have something that tells us who we are. And weather has a way of doing this. I have always taken the weather personally. Freud said, “To talk about the weather is to talk about oneself.” And I am as attracted to weather as much for what it is as for what people have to say about it. The beauty of weather is that we all share it equally. At this point in history it may be the only thing each of us holds in common. One of the projects I have going here is a kind of collective self-portrait of Iceland – I’m more or less ghost-writing/producing it; I’m collecting through interviews the story each of us has about their weather. (…)
Here in Iceland dramatic weather is not necessarily the most memorable. My time here has brought me an awareness of the less perceptible things. And being here has exerted a great influence on my work. It was in the matter of learning to see, in the sense of experience, that Iceland became essential to me. It sounds like a simple achievement, but it’s an act of will that took me years to grasp. I learned to be present in the here and now; I learned the unchangeable nature of each moment as it passes and locks into other moments forever. (…) I go north. It’s in my nature. (…)
The desire to go north is an attraction to solitude, open space, subtle expressions of light and time. Vast expressions of scale and horizon. Sometimes going north is about whiteness. Sometimes it’s about darkness. I’m attracted to the darkness. It relieves me of the incessant call to visual attention and it opens interior spaces that offer untold possibilities of discovery. This darkness is really another form of light. It nurtures the wilderness inside me. That wilderness and what it takes to sustain it may be different for each of us. The fact of this wilderness, the necessity of it is basic to individual well-being. And each of us must find a way to keep this space whole in themselves. (…)
Extracted from the keynote speech by Roni Horn. Graduation, Iceland Academy of the Arts, Reykjavik, May 24, 2006
