Vatnasafn/Library of water. is Artangel???s latest and first international commission. Working with artist Roni Horn, ‘Library of water’ is located in the small Icelandic town of Stykkishólmur. During visits to Stykkishólmur, hearing that there were plans to move books from the library building – perched on top of a hill, overlooking the harbour and ocean – Horn, who described the building as “the most beautifully situated library in the world”, put forward initial ideas for new uses for the library building.

In an introduction to the project, Artangel’s, Co-Director, James Lingwood explains that, “at the heart of the initial proposal and the realised project was Roni’s idea to renew the building as a place both for quiet observation and reflection for community gatherings of different kinds”. In Horn’s words, she imagined Vatnasafn/Library of water as “a lighthouse in which the viewer becomes the light”.

The result is Vatnasafn/Library of water; a community centre that houses two of Horn’s installations. A browse through the Library of water website offers a visual tour of the work, where we can see the bilingual rubber floor You are the Weather – a collection of words about the weather – and the other, Water, Selected – an archive of water from 24 glacial sources across Iceland, housed in floor-to-ceiling glass columns (approximately 1ft in diameter by 10ft high).

A third layer to the project is Weather Reports You – described by Horn as a “collective selfportrait […] this is an active archive collecting Icelanders’ stories of their weather, intended as an ongoing, an ever-resolving work”.

The plans are that the local community will programme the space itself. Again, according to Horn, “From this there will be all sorts of activities, like yoga classes and AA meetings, gatherings of the national chess association, book readings, choral singing and so on. This all should make it an active place. But it should be what a community centre is – anything a community wants it to be”. In addition to Horn’s installation, Icelandic fiction writer Guðrún Eva Minervudóttir will be a writer in residence in the space.