Modern ruins of Iceland
Modern Ruins of Iceland
Iceland is a nation with a strong sense of historical self-consciousness based on origin stories as related in the Book of Settlements and other medieval manuscripts. It is also a nation obsessed with modernity, and recently classified by the UN index of economic development as the most developed country on earth. These two elements combine to produce a temporal schizophrenia which is perhaps far more salient than in many other European countries when it comes to mediating between the present and the past. It also makes Iceland an immensely interesting place in which to explore the issues of ruin memories and how the ruins of modernity are given cultural values. At its heart lies an unstable dialectic between the ruin as rubbish and as heritage, between the contemporary and the historical. The aim of this case study is to explore this issue in the context of two sites in Iceland. The first is the abandoned fishing village of Stöðin on the island of Viðey in the bay of Reykjavík. The site was founded in 1901 in the wake of the rise of industrialized fishing which played such a critical role in the modernization of the Icelandic economy, but abandoned in 1943 (Þorkelsson, 1996). Although the whole island is now a heritage site, the chief attraction is an 18th century colonial stone house at the other end of the island – and more recently, Yoko Ono‘s Imagine Peace Tower. The second site will be on another island, Heimaey of the Westman Isles which lie off the south coast of Iceland. Here, in 1973 a volcanic eruption covered a third of the main (and only) town in pumice and ash. Since 2005, a project (called Pompeii of the North) initiated by local people, has been excavating the buried remains of houses from the 1970s in order to create a tourist atttraction. Both of these sites offer the possibility to explore how ruins of the contemporary past are given value, but in very different contexts; one site is slowly sinking into oblivion despite being part of a heritage area, the other actively re-surrected by the local community. One abandoned to changing economic conditions, the other natural forces. In both cases, there are living memories of life at these sites.
The research will involve field visits to both locations, each year for the first two years of the project; it will also involve interviews with people who are involved in the management of these sites, tourists/vistors and people for whom it has a personal history. The objective will be to try and understand how different sections of the community construct their values and attitudes to these places and how the materiality of the places themselves act to constitute or resist these values.