Nína Kristín Guðmundsdóttir

In a rapid march towards the future, little other than the march itself can take place: Hup! Two, three, forwards. In a resolute aim towards our final goal (which is hidden to us though), we have forgotten our team members and turned the game into a solo. In reaction to the march, I come to a standstill and create stories about what I see. These stories appear in narrative installations; a melting pot of fantasy and facts, what is and what could be. The protagonists reside in a place that cannot be found on Google Maps. Let’s envisage a palace, a palace of imagined realities: the Palace of Fiction. From wherever you arrive at the palace, it’s centred. It’s fenced off with a canal that prevents its residents from going beyond its borders, as well as preventing uninvited guests from entering them. On each side of the palace, there are two towers. At the top of each tower, there is a telescope. These are no ordinary telescopes, for, whoever looks through them, is able to see into the past, the present and the future. Like horses’ eyes, their range of vision spans just about a full circle but in their blind spot, the palace stands. This makes it impossible for the residents to see their domicile in context with anything that lies beyond the canal.

 

Among protagonists are the Crab-woman, the Jellyfish-woman and the Shark-man and they each tell us in their own way about humanity’s solo on the world stage. They point out dangers that can be caused by ignoring the importance of symbiotic coexistence, especially in times of uncertainty and fear of the consequences of the anthropocene. While the protagonists swim around in rapidly rising canal waters, their cohabitants experience claustrophobia behind the closed palace doors. When we settled in the Palace of Fiction, we forgot our role as a team player on the field of natureculture. Our team members have had to suffer for this and now the haste has impeded us as well. We look to desperate measures in every corner of the palace but we seem to overlook the possibility of the palace itself being the root of the problem.