Infinite Next: Grímsvötn caldera and planet Earth

Abstract

In this article artists Anna Líndal and Bjarki Bragason discuss their work Two thousand nineteen hundred and Nineteen. The work was presented during the Iceland Glaciological Society’s (IGS) work trip to the Grímsvötn caldera in Vatnajökull glacier on 31. August 2019 in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Hakon Wadell’s and Erik Ygberg’s 1919 expedition to the area and its subsequent mapping. Anna Líndal’s photographic work, Untouched expanse in the opening of the article addresses the importance of observing and recognizing the significance of minor events within the larger context of the environment. The Grímsvötn caldera is in the work observed as a self contained system which, although remote and harsh to its visitors, the artist proposes that it mirrors changes in the world at large. Even though footsteps trodden in the area vanish and blend into the environment, the bodily pressure of one person’s foot creates an imprint which acts as a reflector for sunbeams as ash is moved from the surface of the ice, making it more susceptible to exposure and melting. In this way the environment is continuously altered by human activity despite its constant appearance as untouched wilderness. Their two-part work presented and donated to the IGS cabin at Grímsfjall, Líndal and Bragason aimed to underscore the collision of human and geological time scales which may be discerned through the recognition of the anniversary of human eyes first laying sight on the caldera and its emergence from being an idea in the world (for example in Peter Raben’s 1720 map of Iceland) to becoming a mapped site. One component of the work is a set of cake plates which display two maps of Vatnajökull glacier, on the top side Wadell and Ygberg’s 1919 expedition path is dotted (the first recorded West-East crossing of the glacier). The underside of the plate reveals a recent map of Vatnajökull and the many, though not finite, survey lines established there in recent years and decades. Before the 22 participants in the trip to Grímsvötn drove together from the IGS cabin to the edge of the caldera, to stand in what is believed to be the spot where Wadell and Ygberg put down their tent a century ago, cake with a sugar printed map of the 1919 journey was served on the plates. The second component of the artistic gesture made during the 2019 trip was a wish from the artists to the participants in the trip to walk in silence from where the cars were parked towards the edge of the caldera. Silence in this context served as a means for individual critical and poetic reflection, offering participants for a short moment the opportunity to experience on their own terms the significance of seeing the caldera unfold in front of them at this momentous point in the site’s history.