Reykjavík Grapevine - 30.06.2017, Síða 18

A Way To See
The Sun
ICEVIEW looks at Iceland in a different light
Words: Parker Yamasaki Photos: Courtesy of KT Browne
CULTURE On a park bench in
Taiwan, KT Browne is watching.
She is watching the embrace of
the searing East Asian sun. She
watches people in the park walk
tree-lined laps with small ra-
dios slung around their necks.
She watches workers on scooters
wearing special sleeves to cover
their arms. She looks across the
colourful umbrellas that shield
skin from developing a colour of
its own.
“I started to pay closer atten-
tion to my senses,” she says of that
time, alone in Taiwan. “To how I
felt in certain public spaces, and
how I thought others felt there,
too.” The harder she focused, the
more cultural blind spots she no-
ticed. It was then she began to
question belonging in a new way:
To what deg ree does a ny-
one belong to a place if they
can only view it as an outsider?
Must we participate in soci-
ety—and if so how, and to what
degree—in order to be a part of
it? Is it enough to simply exist?
Somewhere sometimes
Tainan City, Taiwan is 12,794 km
from New York, where KT grew up,
and 9,601 km from Skagaströnd,
Iceland, where she l ives now.
Skagaströnd has 508 perma-
nent residents. It has a post office,
a library, a bank, a gas station, a
restaurant, and in the summer it
also has a pool and a café. Every
year around 50 artists and writ-
ers become temporary residents
of Skagaströnd at the artist resi-
dency Nes listamiðstöð, for any-
where from two to five months.
The residence has a dance stu-
dio, a research library, a ceram-
ics kiln and an exhibition space.
KT first entered Skagaströnd
in 2015 as a writer at the afore-
mentioned residenc y. To K T,
trained both by choice and cir-
c u m s t a n c e t o
observe her com-
munity, there was
a n o bv iou s g ap
between the per-
manent and tem-
porary residents.
The parking lots
were packed for
church and school
e v e n t s , w h i l e
N e s ’s m o n t h l y
ex h ibit ion d rew
in a small but “solid group of
regulars, representing a frac-
tion of the community,” KT says.
With the help of her partner,
Magnús, KT conspired to cre-
ate someth ing “lasting” that
the artists could contribute to.
Sight is not vision
“I wanted to find work that gets
beneath the landscape,” KT says.
“It is easy to come to Iceland and
be enamored with the scenery—
I was for my first month—but I
want work that questions ‘place’
on another level. Work that is not
just a representation or inter-
pretation, but an investigation.”
Through connections at local
artist residencies (and social me-
dia—“Facebook was amazing”),
KT sent out a call for submissions
to an art and literary magazine.
She arranged it around the theme
of travel and emphasized work
that had a special connection to
the northern regions of Iceland.
In Spring 2017, the first volume
of ICEVIEW was sent to print.
The magazine features a cu-
rated collection of fiction, non-
fiction, poetry and visual art that
broadly addresses the questions
KT began asking in Taiwan: on
the privilege of community, on
the responsibility of the traveller,
on the accountability of the artist.
ICEVIEW is currently in its second
publication cycle and is set to be
released in November. The theme
is consistent but its geographical
scope has widened.
“I love travel
w riting,” K T ad-
mits, though she
do esn’t ne ed t o
voice it. It is ob-
vious in the way
she describes her
own experiences,
in the books she
reads (and writes),
i n t h e a u t h o r s
she quotes, a nd
in the places she’s lived. As she
works on Volume Two of ICEV-
IEW, KT Browne continues her
questing: Is it enough to sim-
ply exist? She wonders as she
works, looking more for a pro-
cess than an answer, looking for
different ways to see the sun.
Volume Two of ICEVIEW (www.
theiceview.com) comes out in No-
vember. Submissions are accepted
on a rolling basis for online con-
tent, and the next call for print
submissions will be opened in
early 2018.
18 The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 11 — 2017
“It is easy to come
to Iceland and be
enamored with
the scenery, but
I want work that
questions ‘place’
on another level.”
KT Browne - author of the book.
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