Iceland / Still Museum
Some notes on ecotourism, and coming home to a fun performance this weekend!
Hello and it has been a bit! Glad to be back home after one of the largest and most fun 12 day adventures of my life!
We went to Iceland — me and my partner and kiddo — for a dedicated vacation. No work, no shows, just family time and sight seeing and hiking and swimming and hot dogs.
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I will give you a little adventure photo journal about Iceland in a moment, but first let me tell you about an engagement I have coming up!
I am doing a “performance lecture” as part of the ONE PAINTING AT A TIME program at Clyfford Still Museum in Denver this coming Saturday, June 20th. If you are unfamiliar, check out the story behind the Still Museum… it is a really special place. To be invited to come and engage with the archives, the painting(s), and the space is truly and deeply exciting to me and has me feeling very inspired. Register here (you get a ticket buy registering and buying museum admittance when you get there!). There is currently an exhibition called Still in Sound that pairs sound art with an exhibition of works, and it is worth a trip or two to soak in!
I will be engaging with the audience for a brief lecture/discussion about a painting and then performing some sound/music in the gallery with that painting. I am building a weird little chime/bell instrument to play for this!
Ok, off to Iceland!
Lynette took some much deserved time off of work, I had just rounded a big corner and got an “all clear” after a pretty long recovery from a shoulder surgery, and we decided to take an epic journey somewhere. She suggested Iceland and I basically started packing right away. I’ve always wanted to go, and doing our first international trip with our 4 year old to a place like Iceland felt pretty approachable and also super fun.
We went for 12 days: we spent 4 in Reykjavik, did a loop and some cabin stays in the country side on the south coast and in the golden circle region, and then came back to Reykjavik before flying home.
Iceland is an incredible country but it is hard to not feel like a bit of an alien there; it is a fierce island nation with a very strongly protected national identity and culture. That identity is both the byproduct of colonialism and has also been subject to colonial attack. The Icelanders seem to deeply identify with their landscape as being part of who they are; they are lava people, glacier people, ocean people, moss people. This is deeply charming. It also felt like a constant reminder that we were visitors.
Given the entire population of the country is around 500,000 and at any given moment there are approximately 20,000 tourists on the island, it feels like they have managed a strange balance where tourism is their primary export, and that tourism is focused on appreciating the beautiful and ferocious landscapes there. In that way their export is almost immaterial. It is a conceptual export: Come to Iceland, see a glacier and smell the sea and volcanic petrichor.
So, it was interesting to realize part of the thrill of the trip was these immaterial things, like smells! The sea smell in Iceland is pretty hard to describe, but most of all it is just dramatically not like the sea smells in the US. It is cold and bright and bracing and loaded with ozone and carbon. Very little fishy briny smell. When it mixed with dandelions and poplar sap and angelica and sulphur and rain on the volcanic asphalt, it was a sensory symphony. Smell is this wild fleeting thing! Like music or a sunset. Also, I was reading Dark Ecology by Timothy Morton on this trip, so I was tripping hard on ecognosis and the chocolate of living in an extinction event while taking in these powerful fleeting present moments.
As Cool Americans, but also appreciators of landscapes, smells, vistas, experiences, art, we were all three pretty moved by the majesty and power and beauty contained on this island and the people and culture that take care of it and coexist with it’s beauty and ferocity.
We swam almost every day. The pools and hot springs and geothermal water ruled. Taking a shower in Reykjavik in volcanically heated water and the smell of sulphur in a domestic bathroom mixing with morning coffee and warm bread made for a rich and unique domestic experience abroad.
The two cabins/cottages we stayed at also had geothermal hot water pumped into repurposed hot tubs. The public pools are all very kid friendly (and Icelandic bathing culture is a protected UNESCO heritage).
Swimming in sulphuric geothermal water every day was awesome.
In Reykjavik there was a museum exhibition featuring the sculptures/art/jewelry of James Merry, one of Bjork’s many collaborators. Bjork also had some video/sound works installed that were truly beautiful and bonkers and immersive. One of the galleries had a scent being pumped in, which made the work feel both ancient and also fleeting. I kept thinking about the smells, see….
Later we went to Fischersund — the shop run by Jonsi from Sigur Ros' and his siblings — and fortunately they had an incense that smelled pretty close to the Bjork show smell.
One of the days we took a ferry to Westman Islands. This archipelago off the southern coast of Iceland is a very wild and also quaint little place. Crazy sea side cliffs, puffins and terns all over the cliff walls in places, caves and rough seas and troll boys frozen as stone in the bays. We went to a beach (not theee black sand beach tho) and had a truly moving experience with a horizon, the surf and moss playing, and ancient magma crushed to shimmering sable sand.
We also went to a few tourist traps… but the Lava Show back in Reykjavik was one of the coolest tourist trap experiences I have ever had. They turned an old warehouse into a certified furnace/theater and they melt and pour lava collected from an eruption in the 1910s into the furnace, recycling it multiple times a day, so humans can learn about lava and watch it crawl down a shoot and into a sandy pit.
Seeing molten lava was on my bucket list and this crossed that off in the safest way possible (LOL).
Overall, 12 of the most fun days of my life. Little travel hiccups aside, it was an almost seamless adventure for the three of us. Good food, good experiences, decent sleep, lots of laughs and good hikes.
My only notes, tips, advice, warning for people going to Iceland:
The rumors are true: food is very expensive. Actually, everything is kind of expensive. But it is kind of mostly because they have to import so much there… I think. I also think Iceland is pretty good at capitalism and knows how to make money off tourists.
The hot dogs are good and are more affordable compared to the other restaurant food! I ate 8 hot dogs in 12 days. They are also mostly made from super healthy Icelandic sheep meat and the sauces are delicious… so they are probably healthier than American hot dogs in many ways.
We had a ton of really delicious food in Iceland though… it isn’t all just fermented shark and hot dogs and yogurt. But also, holy crap, the skyr is sooo good.
Be respectful of rules and cultural habits; this mostly applies to the pools. Do ten minutes of reading before you go to a neighborhood pool so you can move through the customs of the locker room showering protocol with confidence.
Also, get ice cream after you go swimming. There is a reason why its a routine there.
Bring rain gear because dang it rains. Jeans don’t work on those rainy days.
Make sure you find places to sleep with black out curtains if you are there in summer. 22 hours a day of sunlight is no joke and doing your circadian rhythms on manual is necessary to get acclimated / over jet lag.
Get out of Reykjavik, but also, enjoy Reykjavik! The countryside and glaciers and volcanos and all that are awesome and worth treking to, but the city and the arts and food culture are also awesome and worth soaking in!
Overall, my biggest take away was that bringing a child along on a big adventure can be hard, but it is also like bringing along a super powerful lens that sees the world in new and insightful and curious ways. Sharing seeing new (ancient) things in the world in new (ancient) ways with a 4 year old rules.
That is all for now! Hope to see you Saturday at the Still Museum!
From the tall grass,
-Matt
I love your perspective on traveling woth your 4 yr old !
Glad yall had a great time!