Stuff and Stars
Uncultivated pastures and wetlands in the lowlands in the
south of Iceland. A scattering of traditional A-shaped
house, roofs and walls clad in corrugated iron, telephone
poles and dilapidated fencing. Overgrown ruins and sand
dunes on the eastern banks of Ţjórsá-river. Does this
landscape store worthwhile stories? Does someone expect us
here? Is someone here to meet us? The landscape, the houses
and the overgrown ruins are of course a testament to bygone
days and a different way of life. But a lot more is at
stake. In the unpublished memoirs of Finnbogi Höskuldsson,
born in 1870 on the farm Stóri-Klofi in Land-province, an
entry in 1882 recounts that late spring that year, a bout
of severe weather, bringing on a fierce sandstorm, killed
off nearly all the livestock forcing his parents to
evacuate the farm. The family moved to Skarđssel, a
deserted farm, but only a few years later harsh conditions
and sandstorms yet again obliged them to move house. The
farmhouses themselves were actually moved to the banks of
Ţjórsá-river where there was no danger of sandstorms. The
farm however collapsed in the big
Suđurlandsskjálfti-earthquake of 1896, three years after
the houses had been relocated and erected there. Everything
is doomed to perish, disappear and fall into oblivion.
In the month of May, in 1918, the family of Ragnhildur
Höskuldsdóttir (the sister of the abovementioned Finnbogi),
her husband Bjarni Bernharđsson, and their five children
was dissolved. They were required to abandon their home in
Hafnafjörđur-town and move East to Gaulverjabćr-shire in
Flói-province. The day after the family arrived at
Sléttaból-farm in Flói-province, people descended on the
farm to fetch the children. Óskar (6 years old) went to the
farm Gegnishólar, Bjarni (2 years old) to Austur-Međalholt
and Róbert (seven months old) to Hellar-farm. Ragnar (at
five) was to begin with taken to Sléttaból but Arndís
(three years old) stayed with her parents in the
seaside-village of Eyrarbakki. After they moved East,
Bjarni and Ragnhildur had two more children, Ólafur, who
died from diphtheria at fourteen, and Bjarni who died when
he was three years old. They tried to get their children
back, but to no avail. Both of them came from families that
had been dissolved.
On 8 February 1982, Óskar B. Bjarnason, first cousin of
Finnbogi, turned seventy. To mark the occasion
Óskar’s siblings came to visit: Ragnar, Arndís,
Bjarni and Róbert. The reunited siblings were photographed
together in the sitting room at the home of Óskar and his
wife Sigurbjörg Emilsdóttir, at Hörđaland no. 6 in
Reykjavík. Twenty-five years on, or in the month of January
2007, Borghildur completed a part of the present
exhibition: She sculpted 31 bowls, one a day, and kept a
diary, a page for each day. From entries in the diary one
learns that Óskar is now living at Grund, a home for the
elderly. His daughter Borghildur visits him regularly and
takes him for walks. She worries about him and he finds it
hard to accept having been “put there”. One
day, when they were taking their usual stroll in the
vicinity of Grund, Óskar asked Borghildur what she was
working on. She told him that she was preparing an
exhibition and asked for his permission to use a
genealogical text that he had written twenty years earlier.
The stories in the exhibition Spreads
are in
fact taken from interviews that Borghildur conducted with
Óskar and his sisters and brothers.
Three years ago Borghildur organized an exhibition of her
uncle’s paintings, the amateur painter Ragnar
Bjarnason. A year later she published a book containing her
conversations with him, as well as colour prints of his
paintings. Five years ago she exhibited the work
Maternal
Patterns in the
30th
anniversary
exhibition of the Association of Reykjavík Sculptors. In
the exhibition she hung numerous portraits of her relatives
on her mother’s side to form a huge circle on a blue
background. In a text the philosopher Eyjólfur Kjalar
Emilsson wrote for the occasion, he states that Borghildur
is, in her work, not only tackling forgetfulness but time
itself – that elusive phenomena that always seems to
slip through our fingers. The same could be said of the
present work, Spreads,
except now the subject matter is “paternal
patterns”. One could add that in Spreads
the
reference to other stories, of ordinary people of the past
in general, is stronger.
In famous ruminations on the concept of history, Walter
Benjamin writes that the past carries with it secret signs
that lead to its redemption. “Doesn’t a gentle
breeze of the same air that bygone generations breathed
caress our cheeks? Can we not hear in those voices, when we
truly listen, an echo of voices that now have fallen
silent?” Benjamin goes on to say that we are awaited
by the generations that went before us, that we are
destined for a secret rendezvous. And if this is the case,
he goes on, it can be said that we, like all other
generations, are ordained with a weak
messianic
force that the past has a claim on. Benjamin is here not
talking about supernatural things; he calls his approach to
history, a historical materialism with a touch of theology.
He is mainly concerned with the nameless, the forgotten and
the poor of the past. Borghildur has in her own way opened
up a door to this very same past and she has Orion, the
most beautiful and splendid of constellations, illuminate
it. In this way it gains dignity and dimension –
redemption, Benjamin would have said. In addition,
Borghildur leaves her mark, her fingerprints, on bowls of
clay, the stuff stars are made of…
Hjalmar
Sveinsson 2007
Translation:
Geir Svansson