Reykjavík Grapevine - 17.07.2015, Blaðsíða 16

TVEIR HRAFNAR listhús, Art Gallery
Baldursgata 12 101 Reykjavík (at the corner of Baldursgata and Nönnugata, facing Þrír Frakkar Restaurant)
Phone: +354 552 8822 +354 863 6860 +354 863 6885 art@tveirhrafnar.is www.tveirhrafnar.is
Opening hours: Thu-Fri 12pm - 5pm, Sat 1pm - 4pm and by appointment +354 863 6860
TVEIR HRAFNAR
listhús, Art Gallery
offers a range of artwork by
contemporary Icelandic artists
represented by the gallery, se-
lected works by acclaimed artists
and past Icelandic masters.
Represented artists:
GUÐBJÖRG LIND JÓNSDÓTTIR
HALLGRÍMUR HELGASON
HÚBERT NÓI JÓHANNESSON
JÓN ÓSKAR
ÓLI G. JÓHANNSSON
STEINUNN THÓRARINSDÓTTIR
Also works by:
HADDA FJÓLA REYKDAL
HULDA HÁKON
NÍNA TRYGGVADÓTTIR
KRISTJÁN DAVÍÐSSON
– among others
PLEASED TO MEAT YOU!
A Quiet Riot
Piecing together the fragments of
Iceland’s old-new constitution
with Eileen Jerrett’s ‘Blueberry Soup’
Democracy | an experiment
This narrative was—and still is—an inspi-
ration to many people across the world,
especially on the popular left in austerity-
stricken countries like Greece, Ireland,
and Spain. Many visitors to Iceland then
find it confusing to encounter headlines
covering each new petty, corrupt, plain
ridiculous sideshow that seems to pop up
each week in the circus tent of Althing.
Imagine The Thick Of It, replace the
spin doctors with Lilliputians, and you’ve
got yourself a pretty accurate image of
what the current coalition government
is like. While our Mayor Quimby-esque
Prime Minister, Sigmundur Davíð, leaves
parliament to eat delicious cake, the po-
lice smuggle weapons in from Norway,
and the rich strip-mine downtown Reyk-
javík to make room for more puffin shops.
It looks like business as usual.
Despite all this, there are grains of
truth to the Icelandic utopian narrative.
Namely, there *was* an end to the old
government after months of protests, and
a new constitution was indeed drafted
and given a democratic mandate to pass
into law by public referendum in October
2012.
So what happened?
Filmed in the years following the finan-
cial collapse, ‘Blueberry Soup: How Ice-
land changed the way we think about the
world’ is unique in being one of the only
sources to document, firsthand, the po-
litical movements that emerged between
2009 and 2012—from small sewing clubs,
all the way up to the protests outside
Althing and the eventual rise (and fall) of
a new constitution.
I met Eileen Jerrett, the filmmaker
behind the documentary, a day before the
film’s homecoming screening at Nordic
House.
“Immediately after the collapse, I
wanted to come and document what I
thought might be an artistic movement,”
she tells me. “I loved the art community
of Iceland. I was compelled to think that
the collapse would cause a shift—that the
work coming out would be more angsty,
message-filled, and with an edge.”
What she found upon arrival was
something “much clearer,” she says. “The
creative industry was merging with the
political—and forming a movement.”
The bottom-up
Eileen believes this was pivotal in
stimulating a new approach to politics.
“The whole concept of creative thinking
was brought into society on a very func-
tional level, which I had never experi-
enced,” she says. This was embodied in
the emergence of a grassroots thinktank,
the Ministry of Ideas, founded by entre-
preneur Guðjón Már Guðjónsson. “They
were imagining ways they could make
people invest in their society again—how
they could bring back public trust.”
Out of the Ministry of Ideas came the
2009 National Assembly, a 1200-strong
cross-section of Icelandic society. Its aim
was to establish new guiding values, and
how to build those into a reconfigured so-
cial contract. Prominent themes included
equality, welfare, education, and the en-
vironment.
While the constitution fell further
and further away from a public that had
made it happen—from the National As-
sembly, to an elected Constitutional As-
sembly of 25, and finally to a Parliament-
appointed Constitutional Council in the
wake of a null-and-void Supreme Court
election ruling—the film preserves the
essence of the people at the bottom who
made it happen.
“I tried to make sure I was interview-
ing people in the same vein as those de-
veloping the constitution were trying to
do—which was putting people first, not
necessarily figureheads,” she admits.
“That was a challenge in the film and it's
what makes it a challenge to show this
film to other people, because they are of-
ten looking for authoritative figures.”
This personal, independent ethos is
further reflected in the film’s production.
Eileen came to Iceland on three sepa-
rate occasions in 2009, 2011, and 2012.
“I brought a cinematographer with me
twice for a portion of filming,” she says.
“But because we were so small and low-
budget and I wanted to get something
intimate, it was mostly just me with a big
Mary Poppins purse and a camera. That’s
why a lot of the shots are so close. That’s
why a lot of the talking takes place at such
a relaxed tempo.”
‘Blueberry Soup’
comes home
I was ten minutes late for the film’s
screening at Nordic House last month. By
the time I arrived, the film had already
started—and the small auditorium was
packed.
The film begins by following the
meetings of sewing clubs around the time
of the 2008 financial crash. Despite their
name, the focus of these clubs often ends
up being on hanging out and snacking,
rather than sewing. Following the crash,
however, they took on a new discursive
meaning. They became centres of politi-
cal discussion—particularly for women.
“The perspective of women is incred-
ibly important in this film,” Eileen says.
“On the Constitutional Convention, I
had only interviewed women, trying to
link their work there with their sewing
clubs—to see the parallels of what they
discussed there and how that kind of
seeped over into the policy reform.”
With the voices of women often
drowned out by men in politics, it’s more
than refreshing to see a diverse range of
views and experiences represented here.
It does particularly well in highlighting
the connections between decentralised
social groups like the sewing clubs, and
larger political movements.
Eileen has been more-or-less single-
handedly touring the film—a given, for
a young indie filmmaker—but what she
found really surprising was its impact
primarily in the academic sphere. Last
autumn, she took the film across North
America, “talking to students about what
this example might mean for us as a tem-
plate for participatory democracy,” she
says. August will see the film visit South
America, followed by Europe, while Ei-
leen continues to crowdsource funds to
help support the tour and the screenings.
“The very first screening we had was
in partnership with Lawrence Lessig,
a Harvard professor and one of the co-
founders of the Creative Commons—a big
name in media transparency and internet
law,” Eileen says. “So he brought the film
in and then taught a seminar afterwards
with the film as a starting point for the
students. It’s only then that we got think-
ing, ‘Oh, wow. This has a place in the aca-
demic sphere.’ I had no idea that it wasn’t
going to take the festival route and end
up in the classroom instead.” From there,
the screenings took on a unique format—
themselves becoming spaces for political
discussion.
“An end is a start”
“One of the most common questions I’m
asked at these screenings is, ‘So that’s it?
It just didn’t happen?’” Eileen tells the au-
dience of the post-screening Q&A. It’s not
surprising, given that the film is book-
ended by an anticlimax—a brief subtitle
explaining the government’s decision not
to fulfil the second condition of codifica-
tion, a vote in Parliament.
That’s perhaps why I was struck by
an interminable sense of sadness in the
air. That kind of sadness that only comes
with a failed revolution. As some wiped
tears from their eyes, it became very clear
that a lot of people in the room had been
involved since the beginning. This had
not just been a political exercise, but a
very important personal and emotional
journey.
What is also very palpable is a feeling
of hope—that this is not the end. In what
feels like more of a democratic assembly
than a Q&A, neither the speakers on the
panel nor the audience seemed the least
bit afraid of square one. The Icelandic
members of the panel talk of the pres-
sure “rising again,” of Iceland being “the
canary in the mine” for the rest of the
world. As ‘Blueberry Soup’ sweeps cam-
puses and lecture halls worldwide, and
the Pirates surge ahead as a recent Face-
book poll puts the new constitution at the
heart of their policy, it’s not hard to see
how or why.
Meanwhile, Eileen is just as surprised
as anyone else that her lo-fi documentary
has become a major part of this discus-
sion—both in Iceland and abroad.
“I just thought I’d take something I
saw that was amazing and bring it back
home,” she says. “A lot of countries are
feeling so downtrodden about democ-
racy, feeling that people are too stupid or
unimportant to participate. This whole
thing is starting to awaken something in
us—a sort of democratic spirit. I think it’s
a time when people are listening again,
and that the window is starting to open
up again just a crack.”
Despite its low budget and the demise
of the new constitution at the hands of
the government, the film has already
been making political waves across the
world in the year since its completion. It
ensured the lessons of this radical politi-
cal experiment endure, even if it is yet to
succeed.
In the years following the financial crash, a popular nar-
rative of a ‘new’ Iceland emerged.
This was an Iceland which had solved all its problems
forever and for all time by jailing all of the corrupt bank-
ers, by overthrowing its government in a so-called ‘kitch-
enware revolution’, and by ‘crowdsourcing’ a radical new
constitution—one founded on transparency, civil rights,
and directly democratic reform.
Words by Ciarán Daly
Photo provided by ‘Blueberry Soup’
16 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 10 — 2015
To view the documentary online, or to find out
more about screenings,
visit blueberrysoupfilm.com