“On the island – it becomes clear that human time and geological time – are holding hands. There is a generation of scientists that is now retiring after 4 decades of research, some of them have visited the island every single summer like migratory birds, and now their successors are stepping in as caretakers. Measuring the erosion, how the landscape and island mass is changing, the population of insects and flora, if new settlers have made their way to this island and which species have retreated, how the temperature in the crevasses is fluctuating as well as clearing up seaborn debris.

I wanted to find a way to address these objects as individuals, outside of the overwhelming pollution problem context they are automatically placed in, and sat them next to other findings from Surtsey, rocks called Xenoliths.

The rocks are believed to have travelled from Greenland with icebergs that sank to the seabed and were brought up again in the eruption that formed the island. Later, when geologists started noticing these rocks embedded in the young tephra landscape, rocks that are 100 times older than the oldest mineral from Iceland, they extracted them from the ground and collected these “foreign” objects, just like the ones we came across on the shoreline.”

From Travelogue, Island Fiction