Roni Horn interview

Mimi Thompson: How did you end up choosing Iceland as a place to go?

Roni Horn: It’s a question that I’m always asked and I don’t have a real answer for it. I once looked Iceland up in the dictionary and it fell between ice hockey and ice skating. That’s pretty much as controlled a choice as I made. But having gone there, there evolved a relationship that I couldn’t separate myself from. Each time I’d go, there would be engendered the idea to go back and back and back. I guess the real reason is the relationship to yourself that is possible in a place like that. There’s nothing mediating it. There is nothing to obscure or make more complex a perception or a presence.

MT: And yet it’s highly dramatic.

RH: The drama comes from its youth. The landscape is unique in that the geology is very young. It’s like a labyrinth in the definitive sense. It’s big enough to get lost in, but small enough to find yourself. There is little erosion and, as a result, unexpected symmetries exist in unexpected places. America has everything Iceland has, but it’s ten thousand, twenty thousand, one hundred thousand years older, depending on where you look. Growing up in a very “old” landscape—New York City—it’s origins are secreted from the present. I mean that the geological aspect of the landscape in New York City can only be experienced theoretically at this point. In Iceland, you understand empirically exactly what this place is: its what and how. That accessibility effects the nature of one’s experience, the experience of the world. Any place you’re going to stand in, in any given moment, is a complement to the rest of the world, historically and empirically. What you can see in that moment, what you can touch in that moment, is confluent with everything else.

(from Bomb Magazine, Summer, 1989)

****(remembering living in Marfa was like living lit by sun-beams through a facetted cut piece of quartz, nowhere to go but yourself)****