Présentation
The Westman Islands is the second series of a three-part work related to the singular history of my wife's family, which is Icelandic. Her mother is from Heimey - a small island of about 10 square kilometers off the south coast of Iceland, the only island in an archipelago where each island was created by a volcanic eruption. In 1973, another eruption destroyed half of the houses on Heimey, including my wife's grandparents' house. The weather conditions on these islands, swept by the wind and sculpted by the waves, are constantly changing. Surrounded by cliffs, these volcanic rocks adrift in the Atlantic give everywhere a view of the sea. They are sometimes like the fixed points around which the world revolves. The ephemeral nature of things is a certainty in the face of the instability of climate and geology, which gives me a feeling of elation.
I started this Icelandic cycle in 1996. The starting point was a book by the Icelandic author Haldor Laxness that I had received a few years earlier as a gift from my mother-in-law, but its focus soon turned to my in-laws. I started the third Steinholt part this summer in Langanes, the extreme North-East of Iceland, where my father-in-law's family comes from.