Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.12.2012, Page 16

Mario Batali may as well have had
Guðjóna Albertsdóttir in mind. The un-
disputed queen of her kitchen castle,
Guðjóna spent years recording daily
life in her kitchen.
Nine years after her grandma's pass-
ing in 2000, Björg Sveinbjörnsdóttir be-
gan sifing through more than 60 hours
of these sound recordings made by her
grandmother between 1982 and 1990.
The product is an audio poetry
book, ‘Sounds From The Kitchen,’
which gives people intimate access
to a social centre of Suðureyri, a small
fishing village in the Westfjords.
Björg moved away from Suðureyri
at sixteen-years-old, but fondly recalls
spending time at her grandmother's
house in her early years.
Her grandmother would just let
the cassette recording run through-
out the day, picking up chatter and
conversations, sounds from the radio
and the everyday hustle and bustle of
life. Guðjóna used the recordings as a
kind of diary too, often telling stories
or talking about the weather or any-
thing else that came to mind. In one
particular recording, Guðjóna chatters
to the recorder about putting up a new
curtain earlier that day.
“I picked bits that I thought were
poetic and sometimes really funny if
you put them on the paper,” she says.
“There are sounds that don’t belong
to our reality anymore too, like a clock
ticking or the phone.”
Inside the kitchen
Guðjóna began recording sounds
in her kitchen after she retired from
working at a fish factory. She recorded
partly to leave something for her fam-
ily, and partly to document the work of
everyday women that often went un-
noticed. Björg says she thought of her
grandmother as an oral historian, who
in many ways captured the experience
of a working woman.
“I started thinking about it, the
sounds were all from inside the
kitchen. She was from an era of ste-
reotypical gender roles, even though
she worked hard as well,” Björg says.
“Today we think of the kitchen and the
home as something cosy and nice. But
at this time, it was more of a work-
place.”

Finding the funds
After Guðjóna passed away, the record-
ings almost did too. As her family mem-
bers were sorting through her things,
deciding what to do with her posses-
sions, they came across the recordings.
“My relatives said, ‘ah we should throw
it away. It’s just garbage,’” Björg says.
Björg, however, insisted on keep-
ing the recordings, and when she be-
gan a master’s programme in applied
cultural analysis at the University of
Iceland, she began thinking about how
she could assemble the pieces to paint
a picture not only of her grandmother,
but also of everyday life in the fishing
village.
Because of the project’s unique
nature, Björg wasn’t sure where to get
the work published. “It’s sound and
images and text so I thought it would
be hard to get someone to publish it,”
she says. “It’s in a miscellaneous cat-
egory. It has historical documents, but
it’s kind of personal. It fits in many cat-
egories.”
Then one day over coffee with Ar-
nar Sugurðsson, who was at the time
working on a start-up crowdfund-
ing platform called Karolina Fund, it
clicked. “She had this project that was
already very far along, but she just
needed the money to print the books,”
Arnar says. “She had heard about Kar-
olina Fund from somebody, and then
like two coffee cups later, she was very
enthusiastic to go ahead with it.”
Björg set up a page for Sounds
from the Kitchen on Karolina Fund
and asked for 2,500 Euros to finish and
print the books. The project stayed up
on the Karolina Fund page for a month
and garnered 2,653 Euros in dona-
tions. It was the first successful proj-
ect supported by Karolina Fund, which
launched in October.
Björg says many donors were peo-
ple from the village, and a large por-
tion of funding came from a Suðureyri
women’s association. Now with ad-
equate funding, Björg says she plans
to print around 150 copies of the book
in the beginning of December, just in
time for Christmas.
“I did it to finish something she
started, even though she didn’t plan to
publish it,” Björg says. “It’s in her spirit.
She was a colourful character.”
Making the personal public
From the recordings themselves, to
the assembling of the book, to the way
it was funded through a community
effort, everything about the project is
“homemade.”
While some have expressed doubts
about publishing something so per-
sonal, Björg says that she sees the
project not only as a record of her own
family history, but also as a valuable
documentation of social and gender
roles and the individuals that charac-
terised the town, which is something
not easily described in a history book.
“We have this fishing village and we
have a lot of documents about which
boats came and went, when roads
were built, and the way society was
made,” Björg says. “But what women
did was something else. It occurred
inside the homes, with no documenta-
tion. These issues are not as concrete,
so we have to use different ways to
relay them such as using art or ways
where people can use their senses. It’s
not like concrete facts.”
The sounds—ranging from a choir
of children singing to the clatter of
pots and pans and the gentle static
hum of the radio—are as charming as
they are ordinary. The sounds of every-
day life are universal.
“We can all kind of relate, when
people listen to the recordings. People
think of their own kitchen or their own
experience,” Björg says.
THE NUMBER 1 MUSIC STORE
IN EUROPE ACCORDING TO
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SKÓLAVÖRÐUSTÍG 15, 101 REYKJAVÍK AND HARPA CONCERT HALL
16 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 18 — 2012LITERATURE
Words
Kirsten O'Brien
Photo courtesy of
Björg Sveinbjörnsdóttir
It’s been said that a person’s home is their castle, but that may not be entirely true. In the words of Italian-American
chef Mario Batali, “The kitchen really is the castle itself. This is where we spend our happiest moments and where we
find the joy of being a family.”
“
There are sounds that
don’t belong to our reality
anymore too, like a clock
ticking or the home phone
ringing.
„
Sounds From The Kitchen A new book
combines sound, poetry and photography to form a unique
portrait of a beloved space
You can hear excerpts of ‘Sounds From The Kitchen’ on Stöð 1 around Christmas. Stöð
1 is broadcast by the State. It’s the one channel that everyone gets for free. Well, it’s
sort of free. All individuals over 18 years old who pay income tax also pay a special TV
and radio tax.