Isabel CodinaA Room In Iceland: a non-landscape book (SIGNED)

The idea of doing an Icelandic Landscape Book was not mine. Aegide already had done it and told me in 1993. So, I decided to include it in my Icelandic no-landscape book. I haven't seen the book, but my search for it finished when Arna told me she has the book and she will send it to me.

My trip to Iceland starts in 1988, event through I didn't know it at that time. I went to the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and there I met Arna dans Ingileif. We lived together in a house in Mariabastion. Every morning, we exercised, had breakfast and dreamt all the time. There were other Icelanders around: Thorvaldur, Pálína, Ibby... that used to join us at our place. The Icelandic group was my family then. They were singing together Icelandic songs and I was the only audience during their rehearsals. They told me many stories about their country: Icelandic horses and sheep, Thorradblód, saga stories, long winters without sun... (...) I knew I would go to Iceland at any time in my life. It was a very known land for me from my colleague's storytelling : an accounted land, one that I imagined in my head, like a promised land. And that trip finally came in 2015. That summer I decided to travel to Iceland by impulse and a bit unconsciously. I could see many places I was told about many years ago. I could feel how it is being in this land, experiencing the weather, the infinite light brightness in summer, the power of the springs and volcanoes. My first idea was to make a book about landscape, but as a big surprise, I couldn't take many pictures of a place I knew mostly from words and charged with strong feelings. It was a landscape known by stories and feelings more than pictures and when this landscape was placed in front of my camera, I was not able to easily represent it. Besides that, some of the people that had been asking me to go to Iceland, were not there anymore. (text in the book written by Isabel Codina)