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This year, Iceland will be represented at the Venice Biennale by Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, both currently based in Rotterdam. Here is a conversation about an island under construction and how art can take advantage of that.Under Deconstruction is the title of the presentation that Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson (from Spain and Iceland, respectively, working together since 1997) will be contributing to the Icelandic pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. We might better put the word ‘pavilion’ in quotation marks, because, ‘Your country does not exist in Venice’. This statement was by Vasif Kortun, this year’s curator for the United Arab Emirates pavilion in Venice, jokingly made to the artists in a wink of the eye to one of their better-known works. Iceland in fact has no building of its own. Between 1984 and 2006, it rented a small pavilion from Finland, and every Biennale year since then, Iceland has had to look for a new location. As Ólafsson explains, ‘In Iceland, there is no Mondriaan Foundation to fully stand surety for the location and budget. The Icelandic Art Center covers part of the costs, whether or not funded by the Ministry of Culture; the rest has to be gathered through fund-raising. Each year, taking part is a major effort. The presence of Iceland at the Venice Biennale is still under construction, or under deconstruction, whichever way you want to see it.’ This applies even more so to the country itself. Iceland is intently searching for a new identity. Since the 2008 banking crisis, the country has remained in the throes of economic recession, something that does not leave its politics, population or artists untouched. Last year, an initiative was taken to have 25 people from all walks of Icelandic life become members of a special new ‘Constitutional Committee’, a democratically elected organ that can propose changes to the constitution, whose current version was adopted with just a few corrections from Denmark when Iceland became independent. Icelanders were happy with this development, until their Supreme Court declared it null and void because of procedural issues.

Constitution in Song

It can justifiably be called prophetic that back in 2008, six months before the economic crisis, Castro and Ólafsson used Iceland’s Constitution as the foundation for a work of art. They commissioned the Icelandic composer Karólína Eiríksdóttir to write a musical score to the 80 articles of the Constitution. The work, for soprano, baritone, piano, double bass and choir, was first performed in 2008 in Akureyri, Iceland, but Castro and Ólafsson had greater ambitions. They wanted their work to reach the rest of the country. In 2010, they successfully collaborated with Icelandic television and the Hafnarborg Cultural Centre to record a performance of the work, and it was broadcast twice. In February of this year, it was again performed at the Cultural Centre in Hafnarborg, and thanks to all the attention it has received, it had a large audience. ‘It was a strange, emotional event,’ says Libia Castro. ‘The atmosphere during the performance was incredibly laden.’In Venice, Castro and Ólafsson will in any case be presenting the video made in conjunction with this project. Constitution of the Republic of Iceland shows the recordings made by Icelandic television of Karólína Eiríksdóttir’s musical work, in combination with the documentary footage that Castro and Ólafsson took in the studios, among other things of the TV crews at work. ‘The video is based on the same concept as the performance: reflecting on and playing with an official text, making it your own and re-forming an existing structure in order to remind yourself that it was made by people for specific reasons, and that we can therefore change it again.’ The video is not just about the performance of a piece of music. It can also be seen as an ironic portrait of the television culture of Iceland. To this end, Castro and Ólafsson intentionally make use of the effect of dislocation and alienation involved in converting from one medium to another. The Constitution becomes a musical composition, then a performance, then a television recording and finally a music documentary. The meaning of the work is never unequivocal: its significance lies in these switches in translation.In early April, it was announced that the Parliament of Iceland had finally found a political construct in order to appoint the 25 representatives elected by the people to a Constitutional Parliament. It will indeed now be possible for the people themselves to rewrite the Constitution of Iceland. In Venice, Castro and Ólafsson will be presenting a work that connects to what is at this moment Iceland’s most topical subject. Bull’s eye. Nonetheless, they have resisted any temptation to present a previously existing work.

Social Engagement

This also applies to their multisided work Your Country Doesn’t Exist (2003-present), which will take new form at the Biennale. The project began in 2003 at Platform Garanti in Istanbul, as a sculpture based on Dada and Surrealism. Since the beginning of their collaboration, Castro and Ólafsson have been engaged in creating experimental environments in museum spaces, which they perceive as ‘extensions of the street’. ‘The street is heterogeneous, has many entrances and exits. I want our work to be that way as well,’ explains Castro. In recent years, they have been disseminating the slogan ‘Your country doesn’t exist’ in ever-changing forms: as a drawing on a wall, as a billboard, or as advertisements in various countries, including the Netherlands, Austria, the United States, Italy and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Venice, it will appear as a blue neon sculpture and will be found on the wall of the Palazzo Zenobio’s somewhat dilapidated former laundry room.Social engagement and field research are a permanent factor in Castro and Ólafsson’s work. The relationship between museum space and the realities of society is always central: in terms of transfer and communication, by way of their intensive investigatory and performative working method, and also because of their reconnaissance of the literal relationship between interior and exterior space. They will be applying that same working method in Venice. How does one react to an urban structure made exclusively of historic monuments, in which nothing seems to exist beyond a touristic reality? In response to this question, Castro and Ólafsson will assume the character of the gondolier – the ultimate symbol of Venice as a tourist attraction. Their text ‘This is an announcement from Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson: Your country doesn’t exist’ will be chanted from a gondola. A professional singer and two musicians will lard the performance with quotes from texts about the work of Castro and Ólafsson, taken from the catalogue accompanying the presentation. A sound recording of the performance will be available to listeners at a separate location in Venice and a video will be moreover by produced of the performance. It will be shown in the Icelandic ‘pavilion’.

On the Roof

If, as a subversive strategy, all this seems somewhat mild-mannered, visitors to Venice will also be able to listen to Castro and Ólafsson’s work Exercising Ancient Ghosts (2010) on the roof of Palazzo Zenobio. In it, a Neapolitan woman and a foreign man read aloud ancient text fragments referring to the position of women and foreigners in antiquity, while they are making love. In the ancient world, fear of crossbreeding or racial intermixture was an inherent part of patriarchal society. At around the middle of the fifth century BC., a law was introduced to punish intercourse between a Greek woman and a foreign man – as this could result in impure citizens. Visitors to the Biennale can go to the roof of Palazzo Zenobio to hear how people dealt with this age-old fear, two and a half millennia ago. The title, Under Deconstruction, poignantly refers not only to Castro and Ólafsson’s working method, but to the broader political constellations of the year 2011, in Europe and elsewhere, which are likewise also largely under deconstruction. It moreover refers to a form of bringing oneself into perspective, self-relativizing, because by allowing texts about their own work to reverberate across the canals of Venice, the artists also seem to want to deconstruct themselves.Ingrid Commandeur is a researcher and art critic, RotterdamLibia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson: Under DeconstructionPalazzo Zenobio, Venice (Dorsoduro) 4 June–27 November Translated from the Dutch by Mari Shields