Strandaglópur/Castaway
Textile, carbon fiber poles, iron fittings, nylon rope
3x3x3meters
2024
Collaboration with Jóna Berglind Stefánsdóttir
During the second world war a British or American warship in the Atlantic Ocean lost control of an unmanned anti-aircraft balloon. These balloons were large cigar-shaped objects. They were covered with dangling cables and tethered to ships in order to make it impossible for German airplanes to dive-bomb the ships without running into cables dangling from the balloons. The lost balloon drifted across the ocean, met land in south-eastern Iceland where it crashed.
The people in the volcano-ravaged, isolated and sparsely populated region, named “the wasteland” (öræfi), had for centuries become accustomed to using materials which drifted in from the ocean from shipwrecks. Many of the farmhouses there are built with driftwood and shipwrecks hauled from the jet black beaches at the edge of the volcanic desert.
The crashed balloon was no exception. The locals cut the giant balloon up and used the silver-coloured, rubberised canvas material it was made of to sew rain gear; Waterproof raincoats and rain pants. For decades after the war it was said that the people of the wastelands were recognisable from a distance because when it rained they were silver-coloured from head to toe.
The sculpture is a rainsuit-shaped balloon suspended from the ceiling.
Photos from installation at Nr5 Umhverfing in Höfn í Hornafirði, Iceland and at Konstepidemin, Gothenburg, Sweden.