Ljósaljóð: Marta á Góðafoss

While in Bjarnarfjörður, Marta Guðrún Jóhannesdóttir and I took a walk at Góðafoss relying on the exercise "35 Alive" to guide and document our conversations with the landscape. Marta's documentation of her walk included text, painting using the natural palette available in the landscape (mud, crowberry juice), and an audio recording where she pronounced the names of landscape components that caught her attention during her walk.

When I listened to Marta's recording, I realized that by 'naming' the environment, we populate the environment with what we know. If we attempt to name all of the components in the landscape that we can immediately sense, we create a dizzying or hypnotising mass of words. I then worked with Marta's recording to recut it in a way where listeners may "see" the environment that is being named as it being named, even though the listeners are not physically present at the described site.