16 In Roman and Medieval geography, “ultima Thule” designated any place beyond the borders of the known world, and was located in the far north. In Greek mythology Thule was the capital of Hyperborea, the land of the gods. During the Middle Ages, Iceland was sometimes called by this name.
Images always precede thought by many years, and they often contain the answer to enigmas. Before I knew what this project would become, one of the first images I gathered for my research was Roni Horn’s map of Iceland with a red spiral of words on it. Now this place touching the Arctic Circle is emerging as the final point of a journey that has included several exhibitions but that is, in essence, narrative.
I started out with a historical investigation into the place of early-twentieth-century polar explorers in the collective imagination, thinking that I was working on a doctoral thesis, until I realized that what I was interested in was actually the enigma of my fascination with those images, images that came back to me with queries about my own identity and posed questions that always converged in those polar documents. From here on out, the exploration had to be interior, I had to go inside myself to find the origin of those glaciers and thick ice caps. As I perforated the layers of ice, I reached the prime origin of us all, the family. From that point on, the historical research began to seem like a distraction, the creation of images began to seem ambiguous, and the introspection, inadequate.
My new explorations shifted foundations and shook some of my load-bearing walls in a personal deconstruction that left me fragile for months. A process that, along with the illumination of previously hidden areas, has meant the loss of some points of support that I believed were important to my life. All this with the backdrop of a family in a permanent state of reconstruction.
Iceland awaits me: located between the two faults of the European and American continents, with constant volcanic activity, geysers, ice, lava fields: elements that I relate to some areas of my family landscape. Given that this island is the link between the two continents, I relate its geography to the role that we all take on as a result of the union of two different identities. And I declare myself Icelandic, from now on. Putting an end to a process that was never meant to be permanent, but rather just a phase of my journey, I finally face up to—not in books but physically—the region that has occupied my imagination in recent years.
The polar world, like the tropics, is always utopian, by convention and mythology. This voyage is not intended to be epic or exotic, nor is it meant as a means of evasion. Quite the contrary: it is a very intimate journey that I undertake alone to the volcano that leads to the center of the Earth, in order to bring a series of metaphors face-to-face with reality. And as Professor Lidenbrock recommended to his disciple Axel, I will head to the Snæfellsnes peninsula and to the very mouth of Snæfellsjökull to learn a lesson from the abyss. After that, I hope, will come the Stromboli sun.