Prologue

Forty years after an eruption on the Icelandic island of Heimaey, Erik Berglin reads on a blog that a person perished during the event. Rather than fleeing, the man had broken into the village pharmacy, where he was later found lifeless.

Why would he enter the pharmacy at the very moment the island was struck by its first eruption in five thousand years? There’s something strange about the man’s death, and Erik Berglin decides to travel to Iceland to uncover what really happened that winter night so many years ago. 

The book is structured around fragmented and voyeuristic observations, beginning with an investigation into the man’s mysterious death, but the story takes unexpected turns, branching off into winding digressions and side stories.

The reader embarks on an associative journey around the world, following historical events and phenomena that relate, in various ways, to the small island of Heimaey. Fact and fiction intertwine, with text interspersed with landscapes and collages created with both analog and digital retouching.

It is a genre-blurring book that portrays a volcanic eruption and explores what happens when an entire community is forced to flee in the middle of the night. At the same time, it’s a portrait of the artist and the artistic process.

“I remember one day when we were moving the pumps, burning stones were falling everywhere, it was very dangerous. A little further away a model was being photographed. It was very surreal to see this beautiful girl getting almost naked while changing outfits. You had to be careful and look out for falling but I couldn’t help staring at that girl and completely lost focus on what we were doing. One stone almost hit me in the head but my friend pushed me away at the last second. Someone told me years later that they had seen those pictures in Vogue Magazine.”

– Birkir