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Iceland
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Tokens of Curiosities
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Tokens of Curiosities 

Let us carefully ‘read’ these remains of civilization in the Icelandic landscape, ravaged by time, immobilized, hostages of nature itself.

Photographed in close-up, they resemble giants, or rather the abandoned playthings of a giant.

Revealing shells, derelict machinery, almost posed against the landscape, imposing, expressive of utter silence and yet given voice through their mass and volume, unmoving, awaiting definition, like a residue of force in a state of rest, among merciless conditions.

There is no doubt that these objects are powerfully emotional in their effect. They are striking examples of resistance and endurance, despite their decay, because they remain determined ‘inhabitants’ of the landscape, giving rise to a cosmic paradox, a reversal of the function of the habitation of nature.

With their totemic mass and gravity, these structures are very much there, inhabitants of their place. Yet for all their mass and volume, they are without aggression, they eschew action, figures slowly ageing into winter, abandoned, but uncompromising.

As a group they form a composition, like an installation dispersed across the island, simple metaphors and allegories of sculptural constructions, works of art in an open-air museum. Art in progress, in which the phenomenology of perception touches on the phenomenology of imagination, which requires that we experience, directly and without mediation, these unique images as the creative acts of an artist.

Thalea Stefanidou

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