Reykjavík Grapevine - jún. 2021, Blaðsíða 13

piece in the south of Iceland near
where Eldhraun is, where we had
this mega, gorgeous, panoramic
nature, but also this violent nature.
The frolicking, cliched lovers in this
kind of landscape."
You don't have to get it
Since the piece’s launch, many
critics have had different takes on
‘Death Is Elsewhere.’ It’s honestly
not a piece that invites interpreta-
tion so much as just experience.
It’s something to be felt; not un-
derstood. Fortunately so, as Rag-
nar admits that not even he knows
what it means.
"I really like pieces that I don't
understand myself,” he says. “It was
something that I wanted to do, in
this nature, with these people and
this material and it just all came
together. When I watch this I'm
still like 'What is this?' I really like
it when pieces are like that. When
you're like 'what the hell is this
piece?' When you can explain to
yourself, as an artist, 'this is this',
then it's almost like, why bother
making it?"
Painting is hard
Ragnar happily shares photos from
the shooting of Death Is Elsewhere,
showing how the cameras were
set up, comparing it to a "techno
Stonehenge"—a ring of cameras,
each equipped with three mics,
their lenses facing outward.
"I really like the painterly quality
of video,” he says. “Video is like a
painting and I really like painting."
This naturally raised the question:
why not just just paint? Ragnar
responds immediately: "It's really
hard to paint," and then laughs at
length. "Also, I really like some-
thing that's performative and nar-
rative in its essence, turning it into
something that's just like a paint-
ing. Where there's no beginning
and no ending—it's just there."
Those summer nights
As far as the difference between
the English and Icelandic titles go,
Ragnar says that he felt a direct
translation didn’t work and was too
“oppressive,” so he took the sug-
gestion of his wife Ingibjörg to just
call it “sumarnótt”. He is, however,
considering changing the title to
Sumarnótt/Death Is Elsewhere be-
cause, he explains, "’summer night’
on its own is a little too ‘Grease.’"
"These few hours of an Icelandic
summer night are a bit like what it's
like to be dead,” he says. “These few
hours when the birds are asleep.
My dad used to take me for a night
walk around summer solstice up
in Hei!mörk, to watch this thing
when the birds stop singing and
then start singing again."
You can hear this in the piece as
well, as the birds go silent, but then
later begin to sing again—perhaps
underlining the idea that death
may always be with us, but for the
moment, in a gorgeous Icelandic
meadow where death once sprang
forth, it is indeed elsewhere.
H
ve
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The twin takes it all...
13The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 06— 2021
A still from 'Death Is Elsewhere'
“The joke became
‘it's like ABBA, but
with twins’.”