I returned to Roni Horn's Library of Water in the town of Stykkisholmer on the north coast of the Snaefellsness peninsula. (Refer to my July 31, 2012 entry on first visit). The former library contains 24 floor-to-ceiling clear glass columns of water collected as ice from some of the major"jokulls" of Iceland, formed many millennia ago and now are rapidly receding. I was told that one of the glaciers represented in the installation has melted. Rebecca Solnit in her most recent book, The Faraway Nearby, referred to the library as an homage to the primordial forces of the glaciers. Is it too soon to rename the library to "Museum of Water" as an homage to once was?
Nonetheless, it's a striking homage as the glass columns refract and reflect light onto a vulcanised rubber floor embedded with single words in Icelandic and English: ill, cruel, slaemt, bad, stillt, tranquil, svalur, cool, hressandi, bracing, lygnt, still, glettid, frisky, vitlaust, crazy, napur, piercing cold, blautt, wet, heidur, quiet. The isolated words are adjectives that describe weather. Roni Horn wrote "Weather is a metaphor for the atmosphere of the world, for the atmosphere of one's life; weather is a metaphor for the physical, metaphysical, political, social, and moral energy of a person and a place."
