The project is a reference to the local protester ‘Helgi Hóseasson’, a well-known Icelander. Just like him we used a sign with text to interact within the public domain. Helgi Hóseasson is a protester of 89 years old, who became famous because of his protesting in the city of Reykjavik for more than half of his life.
invitation of the project
Website of the project
ICELAND BEST PLACE TO LIVE
Just before we visited Iceland, the annual U.N. table was published. In the Human development-ranking index 2007 (HDI), Iceland came out as the best place in the world to live.
(You can find the report here.) On first sight this report correspond to the first impressions we got of Reykjavik. The city and its suburbs looked very wealthy, peaceful and neat. We asked ourselves; is there nothing to worry about in this country?
To get a better understanding of the political situation of the island, we started to read all different news websites and personal blogs. We found interesting critical quotes and strong statements of well-known and less known Icelanders. We decided to collect these quotes and to make an archive of these sayings that represented interesting political developments in Iceland of the last year. Since it was almost the end of the year, we thought about making an alternative review of the year. Therefore we only focussed on articles found on the Internet that were written in 2007.
In the last decade or so, journalism has changed enormously. The Internet has personalised and democratised the news reports to a great extend. Blogs and other websites increased the political public awareness and made it possible for ‘normal’ people to give comments on news reports or to write ones their selves. The new communities on the Internet share information and organize ongoing discussions of diverse topics. For the project ‘Iceland best place to live’ we explicitly choose quotes from the Internet because we wanted to investigate the ‘Freedom of speech’ on the Internet compared with the freedom within the physical public space. The process represents in a way ‘the new folk culture’ that exists on the Internet.
From 13 December till 31 December 2007, we presented a selection of quotes in the city of Reykjavik. We tried to find a direct method for the representation of the ‘internet news’ in public space. It was an experiment to see how people in the streets would react to the quotes. The interventions in the public domain must be seen as test cases to find out if we could activate some public debate on different political issues. Could we provoke reactions in public space similar to that of an Internet blog?
We used the city of Reykjavík as a set for the quotes. We tried to find the most perfect scenery in public space for every single quote. In the beginning of the research we were looking for a place that illustrated the quote, later on we started to interpret the news more freely. We recoded the meaning of the news by placing it in a specific location in public space. Within the direct area of the performance we spread cards with a reference to the website of the project.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Click here to enter the website of the project >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
