Reykjavík Grapevine - 10.08.2012, Page 20

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The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 12 — 2012
Iceland’s Troubadour Takes His Love Song
Around The Globe Almost four years after
orchestrating the Pots and Pans Revolution, Hörður
Torfason is in high demand
Words by Mark O'Brien. Photos by Alísa Kalyanova and Hörður Sveinsson.
Hörður Torfason is not a man
known for sitting back and tak-
ing a break. In his youth he be-
came an accidental standard-
bearer for gay rights in Iceland;
to a different generation today
he is instantly recognised as
the man who stood before the
crowds outside the Alþingi in the
dark days of 2008 and told them
to go home, gather their pots
and their pans, and come back
to make themselves heard.

This summer, however, he is back home
in 101 Reykjavík to care for his elderly fa-
ther and enjoy some time to himself and
his Italian-born husband Massimo. “I
take a vacation every year. I want to stay
here in July and August,” he tells me,
dressed casually in a t-shirt and loafers.
Though now sixty-seven years old, he
still possesses the vitality, the soft-spo-
ken charisma, and the twinkling baby
blue eyes of a man barely half his age.
He has only just returned from
Spain, the latest in a string of expedi-
tions that have taken him across the
world. “They wanted me for a discussion
on a very popular television programme
called ‘La Nube,’ (“The Cloud”). It was
a three-day job: one day f lying out, the
next day to meet them, and then after
filming we came straight back home.”
His grand tour has seen him cross
entire oceans and continents. He reels
off his previous destinations with the
natural ease of a professional globetrot-
ter. “I’ve been invited to Spain many
times. I’ve been invited to Mexico, Ven-
ezuela, Italy, to the Czech Republic, to
Slovakia, Denmark, Sweden. And there
are many more to come.”

Mr Pots and Pans

But why is the entire world now clamour-
ing to hear the eloquent yet gentle voice
of an actor and singer from Reykjavík?
“It all started last summer,” Hörður
says, “when the rest of Europe woke up
to their financial crisis. Then people un-
derstood that something had happened
here in Iceland—a silenced revolution.
They wondered why there wasn’t anyone
talking about it. They saw me as a leader
of the Pots and Pans Revolution, and
started asking about what we did here.”
Since then, campaign groups and
organisations of every hue have been
on the phone. When the Spanish Indig-
nants gathered last summer at Madrid’s
Puerta del Sol to demand radical social
reform, they sparked a movement that
spread to New York, Continues over
“
Someone came up to
me and said, ‘There are
only two people I believe
in: Che Guevara and
Hörður Torfason’„
Iceland | Activism