Olfactory portrait of place, 2024–
Created for Laugarás Lagoon

A VILLAGE IN THE FOREST

At the end of 2023, Hjalti Gylfason contacted me.

He had experienced the work I had created for Hvammsvík and told me about a new bathing place he was building in Laugarás.

I began visiting in the spring of 2024.

At the time, Laugarás Lagoon was still a large construction site, full of people working. Hjalti walked with me through the site and took me to some of his favourite places around Laugarás, from the geothermal area to the greenhouses.

He already had a clear vision for the experience.

Not only the baths, but the food, the landscape and the atmosphere around them. He told me about the ideas for Gísli Matt and the restaurant that would become Ylja.

I began thinking about another part of the place.

What did Laugarás smell like?

THE SCENT MEMORY OF LAUGARÁS

I wanted to understand the place not only as it existed in front of me, but through the people who had lived there.

So I began asking people from Laugarás, both those still living there and those who had moved away, to give me their scent memories of the village.

What came back was a strange and beautiful olfactory portrait.

Greenhouses. Warm pipes. Wet earth. Flowers. Geothermal water. Poplar in spring.

But also grandmothers’ flatbread, laundry dried outside, crayons melting on hot-water pipes, tomato plants left on the hands after picking, and the smell of the little shop where sweets were still sold unwrapped.

Together, the memories began to form another kind of map of Laugarás.

A map made from smell and memory.

THE CLEARING

But there was one small place I kept returning to.

A little forest clearing that today sits just behind the forest pool at Laugarás Lagoon.

During my visits it became a kind of resting place for me.

I would stop there, lie down for a while, sometimes even fall asleep.

It became my favourite place in Laugarás.

Eventually I stopped looking at the whole village and began looking more closely at this one small piece of it.

I returned again and again.

I studied what grew there.

I gathered materials.

I smelled how the place changed.

And slowly, the clearing became the centre of the work.

Today, guests can walk up from the baths, step into the clearing and lie down in the place that became Rjóður.

RJÓÐUR

Rjóður means a clearing in a forest.

The scent grew from my research into this particular clearing and the landscape around it.

Rather than trying to put the whole of Laugarás into a bottle, I let this small place become its olfactory portrait.

The clearing became Rjóður.

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