Signalling the Old World from the New (2023)
Gilles Deleuze describes the “crystal image” (Deleuze, 1985/1989) as moments in which past, present, and future refract through one another, each facet catching light from the others. Writing about “place” from Blönduós, in the present, my thoughts are nested in that shifting structure: memories, speculative imaginings of a family history of immigration from Västergötland, Sweden, to North America just before 1900. I am experiencing my time here — this absolute luxury of time — attempting to notice what I am noticing, watching for the flashings of synthesis that surface and sometimes settle in my awareness.
I visited Iceland for the first time forty-one years ago, in 1985. My first steps off North America were in Reykjavík, with a group of sixty American college students and our leaders, all of us spending our junior year abroad on a program called Scandinavian Seminar (https://scandinavianseminar.org/). We travelled together in Iceland for several days before orientation in Copenhagen, language courses in our respective countries, home stays, and then a school year within the Scandinavian adult education system known as folkhögskolor, or folk schools (https://folkbildningsradet.se/om-oss/translations/english/the-folk-high-schools/). My folkhögskola placement was at Hellidens (https://helliden.se/), in Västergötland. It is a school with a craft and design emphasis, and by chance, not thirty miles from my living Swedish relatives and the family farm.
The foundation of Scandinavian Seminar was/is language immersion. This formative experience for me became the touchstone for my curiosity as an artist, exploring the privilege of the English language as world lingua franca and adjacent rabbit holes of research that include a consideration of globalization, mapping and borders—coming more granularly into focus upon my own eventual immigration to Canada from the United States. Signalling the Old World from the New (2023) and #HEGEMONY (2022) are two examples of this thread running through my research.
Living now with my classmates at Kvennaskólinn, approaching midsommar in this uncanny and unlimited daylight, the present time is imbued with facets of memory of that year living in the castle at Hellidens — the Helliden slott — vignettes layered and refracted with what has transpired since those first baby steps, at the age of twenty-one, stepping off a plane from New York to Reykjavík.
Jen Wiebe
References
Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The time-image (H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1985)
Folkbildningsrådet. (2026, March 10). The folk high schools. https://folkbildningsradet.se/om-oss/translations/english/the-folk-high-schools/
Hellidens folkhögskola. (n.d.). Hem. Retrieved June 19, 2026, from https://helliden.se/
Scandinavian Seminar. (n.d.). Home. Retrieved June 19, 2026, from https://scandinavianseminar.org/