It is in this former library (a new, larger library with easier access has been erected below) that Horn is installing Vatnasafn/Library of Water. The given of the building, its aspect and position, are almost enough, and Horn is returning to the town something that has been here for years, but has mostly gone unnoticed.

Perfect, plain, identical floor-to-ceiling clear glass columns stand about the largest room, crowding near the entrance. The columns are filled with water. Some stand apart, others cluster to form a loose, convivial group. Moving between and among the columns, one thinks of a grove and of people—especially when Horn slips her arm round a column and leans against it, giving it an affectionate embrace. Momentarily, I am nervous. These things weigh tons, and only a few of the columns are properly fixed in place yet. Each is filled with around 50 gallons of water, melted and collected from Iceland’s glaciers—Vatnajökull, Hofsjökull, Drangajökull, Snæfellsjökull, which is on the slopes of the mountain I caught a distant glimpse of earlier and where we intend to drive tomorrow.

As it is, we stay in the library from late afternoon light to total dark, watching the light fade, which, in Iceland at this stage of year, already takes a long time. Every day is a dial slowly turned, and each perceptively longer than the last. Tomorrow, I realize, is the equinox, when day and night are of equal length. This is the tipping point, after which the days will begin to slide together toward the day-lit nights of the summer solstice, the sun barely dipping into the horizon.

We sit on the floor, in a clearing among the incomplete stand of columns. Each column reflects and refracts the light, presenting an elongated, distorted image of what lies beyond it. Looking through the water-filled column nearest the window, it seems to magnify the horizon, drawing the world into it. Virtual images and reflections slide over the surfaces of the columns and are held captive in them. The effect is unexpectedly complex, and more than a perceptual game of the sort I generally get impatient with. This place slows you down.

The water also clarifies the view and, like Iceland’s air, acts as a lens of peculiarly austere and steely brilliance. Things appear more clearly, more focused and crisp than the reality beyond the window, which the fading daylight is beginning to soften. This sharpness is contrasted by the warmth of the room itself and the muffled acoustics, damped down by the thick, rubbery floor beneath our feet.

The only internal illumination is provided by spotlights recessed into the ceiling above each column. The light fills the glass. The water from some glaciers is gin-clear, rendering their columns so absolute in their clarity they might just as well contain a vacuum. Others are glaucous or milky, others turbid with dissolved volcanic minerals and ash, clay, and pumice. Slowly the suspended particles are separating out and sinking to form thin strata at the bottom of the glass. Some of these glaciers, Horn tells me, are melting so fast now that they may not be with us in a decade, “but this is only accidentally about the endgame.” It is difficult not to take the passing of the natural world personally, equally hard not to feel impotent in the face of it. Horn, I think, wants to avoid the obviousness of art as ecological protest.

She has lengthened the original windows almost to the floor, providing a sweeping view of the town below: the little streets and houses, the concrete church with its extravagantly arching and decorative buttresses whose design might once have seemed futuristic but is now as quaint as an alien spaceship in a 1950s sci-fi story. Fantasies of the future inevitably come to tell us something about the past and almost nothing about the present.

 

The day dims, and the lights go on in houses whose architecture is like a kid’s outline drawing. All that’s missing are a few lollipop trees. They won’t grow here. The complications—and one supposes many complications, especially in such a small and isolated community—are all inside, behind the blue-gray painted cladding, the tan and buttermilk walls, behind the bright windows and under the corrugated iron roofs painted oxide red and vermilion. For some reason I imagine dark winters of indoor violence, muffled voices raised and blown away like litter in the gusty wind-alleys and empty plots between these neat dwellings.