Kvíár_ A guerilla playground
In the framework of Quiet Places, my project investigates a speculative timeline of Öræfajökull volcano and the area that encloses it—focusing on the timeline that spans from the present to the complete deglaciation of Öræfajökull while giving voice and agency to the elements that are choreographed in my dynamic landscape systems. In this transfiguration of life my team of experts, as a collective body, will use performative practices revealed as designs, to commemorate events from the collective past, present and future of Iceland and trace the diverse temporalities of history in a performative topography. The narrative of a performance as a landscape practice that potentially disrupts everyday life in the thickness of time and at the same time is sketching a framework that activates a critical analysis of the landscape. The “consciousness of the explosion of the history continuum” as Walter Benjamin frames it. These explosions are moments when the perception of time is disrupted, and that reveals moments when different temporalities accumulate; a moment that invades the time of normality, of production, of capital, to reveal it as a system of meaning, in the socio-political life of Iceland.
The Kvíár..... Project evolves around the processes that occur at Kvíárjökull glacier, which is constantly creating new layers of topography, and “we” as parts of these new layers, can start looking at the density of how things exist and intersect. Moreover, identifying stages of instability and complex ecological and social systems, and recognising the glacier, the geomorphology, the sediments, the humans, the more-than-humans as intimately connected through these complex relations expands the notion of agency to them. In this framework, it is my aspiration to co-create a landscape figure (in the form of spatial, experimental interventions slowly enfolded into the landscape by these relations) that reminds us that “we” are socially and ecologically accountable in the choreography of politics of climate change. My proposal is to create a guerilla playground that includes a broad field of reflection and experimentation. Bringing to the site of Kvíárjökull the idea of a playground as an other-place, connecting it to other-places around Iceland and with the possibility of expanding it around the world. This playground creates spaces of movement in other places but also the idea of “performing” on unconventional grounds. as an embodied and interactive process. We become active participants in the formation of our understanding of the world. In Kvíárjökull, the elements are not just seen but they are heard, felt, and experienced through our bodies. The climate is not just observed but felt viscerally affecting movement and behaviour. In that notion of movement, the communities are not passive observers but active participants in the creation of their own world. The embodied and interactive experience becomes the centre of my design approach. I am using my design as a tool for exploring and challenging the power structure and looking into the transformative potential of the incorporation of temporary and experimental structures, in the form of a playground that challenges the status quo and invites community participation.
