Topography of Absence

In November 2023, the Icelandic coastal town of Grindavík was evacuated within a few hours. An underground magma channel had pushed its way beneath the town, earthquakes tore up roads and properties, infrastructure collapsed, and almost four thousand people left their homes believing they would soon return. They did not. Ongoing volcanic activity transformed Grindavík into a deserted town on the edge of an active earth's interior.

 

The photographs were taken in June 2025, during a period of waiting in which movement and standstill were simultaneously present. They do not show a catastrophe, but rather its absence. Empty houses, fences, signs and gardens become silent witnesses to an interrupted everyday life. The familiar appears fragile, home as something temporary.

 

The sober, detached visual language and the diffuse light lend the objects a restrained dignity. The house, otherwise a symbol of protection and possession, becomes an artefact in a tectonic process. The work asks what remains when certainties are withdrawn and focuses on an intermediate state in which human order and geological time collide.