Reykjavík Grapevine - 18.05.2012, Side 30

30
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 6 — 2012
Art | In progress
Capturing The World
Hreinn Friðfinnsson's House Project returns home
Some works of art take longer to
finish than others. And some are
perhaps never finished. Hreinn
Friðfinnsson's House Project is a
case in point. The story begins a
hundred years ago, in the summer
of 1912. That summer, a character
in þórbergur þórðarsson’s novel
‘Íslenskur aðall,’ (“Icelandic Aris-
tocracy,” published in 1938), built
a house inside out. The character,
Sólon Guðmundsson, is based on a
real person who lived in Ísafjörður,
but “we know next to nothing about
him,” Hreinn Friðfinnsson told me
over the phone from Amsterdam,
where he has lived for the past forty
years. “He was a common worker at
the start of the twentieth century,
an eccentric outsider, but in þór-
bergur's mind outsiders were the
Icelandic aristocracy.”
BUILdING A HOUSE INSIdE OUT
What captured Hreinn's attention was
the house, called Slunkaríki. “A house
built inside out—that was the concept I
wanted to play with,” he told me. “You
could say that in this way you turn the
whole world on its head.” And that is
what Hreinn did in the summer of 1974,
when he built a house inside out in the
lava fields near Hafnarfjörður. “It's a
small wave to Sólon,” he says, and then
recalled the building process in more
detail. “This was when I didn't really
have a penny to my name and needed
to borrow all over the place. So, when I
had scraped enough money together, I
found a professional carpenter and we
drove into the lava fields; it was impor-
tant to build the house where no other
man-made structures were visible. We
left the car and hadn't really walked
that far before we were all of a sudden
at the edge of this crater—and we knew
this was the place.”
After the house was built, it was
photographed, and this became the
real artwork. “It was built to be photo-
graphed,” Hreinn says. “So we built it,
took pictures, and then we just let it be,
and it has just stood there, abandoned.”
Hreinn himself didn't visit it again un-
til the early 2000s. “By that time there
were a number of holes in it. They were
gun-made; a shooting association had
a cabin nearby,” Hreinn says. Otherwise
it was in pristine condition until the turn
of the century; no vandalism had been
committed.
RETURNING IT OUTSIdE IN
The little house in the lava would how-
ever not be his last house. In 2009,
Hreinn was asked to build a second
house in a French sculpture park, and
this time it would be different. “I had
long toyed with the idea of turning the
house back around, into a normal state.
The house had been open to the world
so long, so when you turn it inwards, it
takes with it all its history,” Hreinn says.
“The first house itself never became
a sculpture or official work of art; it was
just a house hidden in nature where
random travellers might encounter it,”
he says, “but in France the house be-
came a sculpture in a sculpture garden.
You can’t enter it, but you can look
around it, and you can look through the
windows and see what’s inside. There
are pictures on the walls and a copy
of the first house as well as a model of
a third house. There is also an unusu-
ally big asteroid found in Argentina,
in Campo del Cielo.” Hreinn explains:
“By having the asteroid there I reach
as far as I can to take something from
the outside world and put it inside the
house.”
CAPTURING THE WORLd
Finally, the model of his third house,
which could be seen floating around
in the second house, premiered at Haf-
narborg in Iceland this month. It has no
walls. It’s simply a 3-D graphic—an out-
line of the original house in the origi-
nal size, at the place where the original
house stood. “Those boundaries be-
tween inside and outside have served
their purpose. It's sort of a question; it
doesn't have walls, there is no shelter,
and you can be both inside of it and
outside of it. You can ponder it; unlike
the first, this house makes no state-
ment,” he says. And what statement did
the first house make? “It captures the
whole world, except for itself. It turns
the world on its axis.”
I wonder if the ghost houses left
behind by the bubble years have al-
tered the meaning of his house, but he
brushed that suggestion aside: “There
are no political connotations. Per-
haps there is a philosophical meaning,
threads that can be spun in all direc-
tions.” And thus concludes the story
of the three houses—for now. Or five, if
you include the original that Sólon built
and the fictional one Þórbergur wrote
about. And now those houses will re-
turn to a book published by Crymogea,
and an exhibition in Hafnarborg, an art
gallery in Hafnarfjörður. Words
Ásgeir H. Ingólfsson
Photograph
Hreinn Friðfinnsson / i8
“So, when I had scraped enough money together, I
found a professional carpenter and we drove into the
lava fields; it was important to build the house where
no other man-made structures were visible”