In 13 days and 2994 km travelled, he tried to break the mirror and not depict Iceland as the land of rivers, volcanoes and endless glaciers, but photographing it in a completely unusual and aseptic manner.
Because there’s a lot more.
Between the light that goes off and the beginning of the day, he has known places where the ships don’t break, there are no trains and no cars go, where a yellow traffic light means slow down and not accelerate.
Without pushing and striving, children, men and women live here. Under the Icelandic light they have the same look and they share heat and hopes in a neon pool, in the cities that all seem to be the same but with a different name.
Boys race to push a shopping cart, a mother only purchases food with colored boxes, and an old man dives into a hot water pool at 41 °. Tourists visit a church in the northern capital; the participants, all dressed in black – even children – do not matter to the flash and are collected in silence. In an ocean of colors and in a sea of empty roads, he has no idea where he was or where he will be at their age.
He gave space and emphasis to countless deserted football and basketball courts (because there is too much wind), swimming pools, wooden houses in the forests, supermarkets and gas pumps, imagining them as new cathedrals of aggregation, instead of the common malls built all over the world but not in Iceland. If we believe that they are losing and isolating, we must be crazy. They born innocent and have not queued to participate in the race. At the end of the trip he realized his wish: for once, we can get away from the explosion of nature and live in colors, giving voice to the island’s minority: man.
About the author:
Luca Arena was born La Spezia in 1988. He is color-blind since 29 years and every day trying to get over it. He graduated in marketing at Pisa University, but during his free time he travels and takes photographic reports. He has been published by Domus, Designboom, WE AND THE COLOR, Il Mitte, Artwort, C 41 Magazine, Objects, Creative Boom. His recent work “Impersonalism: Tenerife” has been exposed at Spazio 32 in La Spezia, the cultural reference site of Fondazione Carispezia.
