The urge to leave the metropolis, to make yet another journey across the ocean, to revisit and rediscover half of one’s being is a recurring phenomenon for some people. For better or worse, this urge features as a lifetime companion for some of those who have two homelands. The urge, this recurrent force, rarely loses its grip on these people. In fact, maybe it only takes short intervals of time, time warps, the blink of an eye or a change in the direction of the wind before the urge once again sweeps over the consciousness. It kindles a familiar longing, which may get confused or mistaken for sentimentality, teasingly shimmering clearly and piercingly for a short, quivering moment, only to disappear again like an unreliable mirage consisting of jagged mountain ridges at dusk and daybreak and in hazy summer morning mists. Of the ocean’s horizon and birds on strong wings through rough landscapes. Maybe the longing comes unseen, unannounced, sneaking. Quietly and gently it flickers and clings to everyday existence. Like newly fallen snow on rooftops and on the sheep’s tangled wool. Like the white, foaming swell that brutally surges against the rocky beach, like the foam that hits the foot of the mountain.

 The journey across the ocean takes two days. The ancestors in the north were patient. Their sea voyages took even longer. Some of them forever. But across the sky of our time the journey takes just two abrupt hours. The present’s indisputably furious, rapid development that demands something inhuman: to adjust, to ingest, to digest in body, soul and heart. With mind and heart to understand that now you have moved to a completely different place in far too short a space of time. The knowledge that there still awaits a two-hour sea journey, now without the stench of diesel, before once again you set foot on land in the southernmost part of the islands in the north is part of the journey. The journey to the place where the old house stands, built on top of houses that have long since disappeared. The house in Froðba, where the family lived so long ago, though no one knows for sure just how long. The power of memory is violent and mythical. The house seems built of threads that lead to the root. From the root, the threads go out into the world. Out to the world’s other rooms and other homes. Home again.

 Perhaps it is precisely in this abstract and yet painfully concrete time warp, in this closed-in, twisted circuit that the feet change size. That it is precisely in this limbo between abroad and home, between now and before, that they dwindle into a small, innocent, curious child size, before being transformed into the beautiful, intoxicating, desperate and invincible size of youth, only then to grow almost, only almost, to adult size that carry all the patterns of previous sizes in the leather, under the sole and in the strings, that tie them together. They return to the place, the home, the part of existence and of the identity, where the basalt stands like pillars. Shiny black surface wrapped in green, shifting to greenish yellow, then soon it stands brown and vertical. Upright and proud. It seems to threaten by trying to keel in over the landscape, out over the ocean and in over the small figures that grow and wander over valleys and on the winding roads. But it does not move an inch. Calming and yet disturbing, it is locked, outlined and praised. No axe can harm it. But with will the intervention can be performed, and parts of what cannot be parted will be carried over the ocean. To the south it is moved, and now stands under a foreign sky. Glitters in the sun, which is more beneficent in this unknown place. Wet by a warmer rain than the previously known. Shaken by unknown winds. Its task is now more tangible, they will certainly feel. Maybe it is far more complicated than that? Perhaps the task is to give a little insight into a form of origin that is pined for and sought after in our day. Maybe to serve as a lock into the origin, which is the foundation, the nucleus of a very small part of the people of the planet, is its fate. It rises, towers and stands sharply etched in the air like the mountain it was cut out of. The origin is divided. Duality, division, halving, fragmentation, confusion? Or is it the opposite: privileges, subtleties, possibilities, growth, creativity and flexibility?

 Is it this division, this separation involved in cutting the root into two that creates the life and art of some people? Is it the earliest fairy-tale landscape memories that are being inculcated, only to be reproduced on paper, on canvas, on the retina that shapes and establishes the line, the colour scheme, the motif? Is the duality the reason for choosing the subject, which is chosen with care and with meticulous training and consideration? Is the division the strength required to be able to live as a complete human being? Are these two such different places, which are so far apart from each other, the basis for what the eye now sees? Because being born to parents, where the gap between cultures at times may seem so profound that the bottom is not even glimpsed, where the abilities, possibilities and likelihood of being able to keep the balance of the line, which will lead one safely to the other side, seem impossible, out of reach, is a special place to stand. An exposed place one might be tempted to say. At the same time it is an eventful place. A place of frustrations, uncertainty, fragmentation and division. It is a place of halves. But it is also a place for whole human beings. It is a place of community and the privileged. A place of possibilities, a place of growth, a place of creativity. A safe place. The safe journey’s place. The place where worlds magically merge into one. Because it is a place where language becomes secondary. Understood, not always spoken. A place where thought takes minutes, where clothes maybe reveal one’s everyday activities. A place that cannot be cut out with an axe. A place, which therefore will always exist. A place where sentimentality can be confused with enclosed valleys, inaccessible gorges and mountainsides, slopes and thundering high peaks and thoughts. A place where we understand and accept that everything in this world cannot be described, rewritten, reproduced or pronounced. Some parts should just be felt and felt again. And be expressed in another form. This is a place where the fragments whizz around each other in constant congestion. But when we avert our eyes, they settle down and form a perfect, symmetrical, sharp-cut frame story about how nothing is complete without the other half, somewhere between all the countless other parts. Of how an entire half place exists. An entire bisected place.