Detail from A Portal to the End of the World. Photographed by Anne Rombach of Sisters Lumiere.
A Portal to the End of the World is a three chapter project where I attempt to open a functional time traveling portal in the Akureyri Botanical Garden. The focus of Chapter I: The Past (meets the future) is the soil’s time travelling journey via heat to the day of its historical highest temperature, in 1974, and its climate altered future when this temperature is predicted to become a regular daily maximum in Iceland during the summer months of June, July, and August.
Fifty years ago on a summer Sunday, Akureyri experienced its hottest temperature in recorded history, 29,4°C. As summers get hotter, this record will become the norm in Iceland around the year 2300. What will happen to plants, worms, humans, mushrooms, moss, elves, and the soil?
The Akureyri Botanical garden is one of the northernmost botanical gardens in the world, experiencing one of the most amplified increases of heat in the global botanical garden network. During this chapter of the exhibition series, a patch of ground gathered from the garden is time travelling to 29,4°C, reliving that hot 23rd of June from its past, and visiting its impending future.
Soon, it will be back in our present year and return to its original spot in the Akureyri Botanical garden to inform the gardens inhabitants of what it has learned, and prepare them for what is to come.
soil from Akureyri botanical garden, store-bought soil, heat, infrared lamp, sous-vide, wood, glass, video.
Exhibition walkthrough:
Note: the exhibition space was very hot and very dark, the only light source being an infrared bulb in an inner chamber.