The wilderness plays a tune on Iceland’s national psyche, be it simply a transmission of the seismic energy that pulses under its earth crust. In this country made up of two tectonic plates of the mid-Atlantic ridge you have small quakes every day. It is a rough lunar landscape of dark lava rock, boulder-strewn hills, lakes of freezing glacier-fed waters and sulphur-belching geysers.

Young Icelandic musicians and artists describe themselves as newly-borns, claiming they have little indigenous culture to battle against. And when you see the participants in the Iceland Airwaves edgy rock festival partying in the Blue Lagoon’s steaming chalky thermal waters, there is something wild and elemental about the sight, like a painting by Hieronymous Bosch. They will also tell you that these days Reykjavik is bubbling with creative energy.

Hallgrímur Helgason, author of the cynical novel 101 Reykjavik that was turned into a hit film, maintains that Iceland has no heroes. The film’s director Baltasar Kormákur adds that Icelanders like losers. “Our sagas,” he says, “are all about serial killers, difficult guys who in the end lose their lives.”

Kormákur claims that the growing to adulthood of Icelandic society had to do with the introduction of beer in the 1980s, and the increased socialising after the belated opening of pubs. “The late 1970s was like growing up in East Berlin. Reykjavik had one bar and restaurant. We’ve changed a lot, but we’re still a small and horny nation trying to prove itself.”

Wild, windy, weird

Icelanders often evoke their deep attachment to their rocky, heaving island, with its waterfalls and stunted trees. Someone told me that the hinterland conveys an exhilarating sense of being surrounded by something more powerful than man. Everyone has a summer cottage in the rocks and shrub, and all heating and electricity is entirely from geo-thermal energy. The island has been planted with pine trees because it was blowing away in the wind, for here nature is a powerful foe.

I was also told that this is the Golden Age of Icelandic culture. There used to be a saying, ‘world famous in Iceland’; the success of Bjork and The Sugarcubes has changed that.

Icelanders will also proudly tell you that their small horses and cows are as pure as the driven snow; the country has not allowed the import of other breeds, thus preserving their stock from foot-and-mouth and other ills. They will also mention threats to Icelandic society that range from rowdy Polish construction workers to the newly wealthy, whose money from international banking or fishing is threatening to destroy a deeply democratic society. “They behave like rich Russians,” someone said, adding that Iceland’s millionaires think nothing of flying in Elton John or Tom Jones for lavish birthday parties.

Cool Culture

The Airwaves festival is a yearly get-together in Reykjavik of young bands – dozens from Iceland alone, and plenty from further afield – that has become a landmark in Europe’s rock calendar, attended by international music promoters and the rock press. The opening party involved the outdoor sound of plane propellers and inspection inside by butch girls dressed up as airport security, and the drink was plentiful.

The trip by a largish group of journalists from Belgium was a foretaste of an ambitious arts festival – Iceland on the Edge – to take place at Bozar in Brussels from February 27 to June 15 (www.bozar.com [1]).

One of the symptoms of the new prosperity is that the fancily accessorised SUVs allow people to travel further along remote roads, dragging mobile homes, when 40 years ago camping involved creaky Trabants and leaking tents. Go to the National Museum, which was built in the first decision Parliament took after Iceland’s independence on June 17, 1944; it gives a well-presented overview of its history, housing artefacts accumulated since the 9th century when the first Nordics settled the island’s inhospitable northern shores and started farming.

Brussels bound

One of its treasures is the lovingly restored embossed chasuble of Jón Arason, this Protestant country’s last Catholic bishop (Christianity came to the country in 1000), who was beheaded by the Danes in 1550. Another is an elaborately carved drinking horn of which only 20 remain in the world (there will be a show of them in Brussels) and a small turf and wood house, of which only 44 remain.

Of the two contemporary shows coming to Brussels, ‘Dreams of Sublime and Nowhere’ will look at how Icelandic artists interact with its dramatic highlands. “It has to be a different way of looking at the wilderness today,” explains Hafþór Ingvason, curator of Reykjavik’s Art Museum. “You can’t be romantic about it anymore. You have to be critical.”

Of course, the citizens of this country are acutely aware of climate change and nature preservation, as they sit smugly on their geo-thermal self-sufficiency. There will also be work by Rúrí, whose conceptual political installations about waterfalls will be shown at Bozar. She says the isolation of Iceland intensifies awareness of the rest of the globe: “One thinks about what’s on the other side.”

Getting there
Although all the seasons have their charms, according to Alla Logadóttir of the Icelandic Embassy, June and July with their long nights are the most irresistible. Costs of Icelandair vary, but in May you can expect to pay around €535; you can also check out Iceland Express.