AGO’s potent volcano exhibit reminds us of power lurking beneath the surface

For six months in 2021, the Fagradalsfjall volcano in southern Iceland sent lava running over the surface of the Reykjanes peninsula. It was the first time the volcano had erupted in more than 6,000 years. Fagradalsfjall, 50 kilometres from the capital in Reykjavik, is a relatively accessible volcano. Sitting in a wide plain at the bottom of a valley, it is not so much a mountain as a decent-sized hill surrounded by cracks in the earth that vent gases and sometimes lava. Despite the obvious dangers of liquid rock and noxious fumes, visiticeland.com dubbed the event a “tourist eruption” — photogenic but easy to get to, with little imminent danger. Crowds of Icelanders trekked out to witness the lava flows.

The Icelandic artist Jónsi was not among them. Stranded in Los Angeles, unable to travel because of the pandemic, he was left to imagine what he was missing. What did it sound like? What did it smell like? What did it feel like to watch the volcano wake up after millennia asleep? The AGO’s recent acquisition of his sound installation “Hrafntinna (Obsidian),” on display at the gallery, attempts to do just that.

A piney, burnt-rock smell wafts out of the gallery, where an array of 195 speakers surrounds a platform that reverberates with bass notes from the subwoofers concealed within. A light overhead takes that platform from dark to dim.

It is very much like sitting in a cave on the kind of day where clouds whip across the sky. The sounds from the speakers crackle; the artist’s voice whispers and pops; at one point a voice (the artist again?) sings what sounds like the name of the volcano, over and over, using big, round churchy tones that wrap around you. The viewer is meant to settle into the work rather than simply stroll by. The audio loop is 25 minutes and 33 seconds long, but it’s easy to lose track of time.

There’s no heat in this volcano (I imagine heating part of an art gallery to appropriate temperatures would have presented certain challenges), but the scent and sounds make it feel warm. The overall effect is like cuddling up to the Earth itself — a disorienting experience, but not a scary one.

If your sense of volcanoes comes mostly through pop culture, the intimacy of “Hrafntinna” comes as a bit of a shock. In Hollywood depictions, mountains ejecting lava serve largely as backdrops for human endeavour, drama and folly. “Volcano,” the 1997 movie starring Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche, had its heroes using a condo building to stop a lava flow from melting L.A. In “Dante’s Peak,” also released in 1997, a volcanologist played by Pierce Brosnan and a small-town mayor played by Linda Hamilton team up to save a town from an eruption modelled on that of Mount St. Helens. Recent additions to the genre include and 2018’s “Jurassic World: Lost Kingdom,” in which the volcano, ultimately, proves less of a threat than human greed.

This emphasis on destruction is not unfounded. In 1985, the eruption of Nevado del Ruiz in Colombia killed 20,000 people when the mudflow, or lahar, it caused engulfed the town of Armero. Recent advances in monitoring and early warning systems have made timely evacuations more likely — but getting people out of the way is about all that we can do.

Yet to see volcanoes as B-movie monsters is to ignore the character of the Earth itself. It was volcanoes that built the early atmosphere, volcanoes that made the oceans. Volcanoes continue to remake the planet daily. Magma hardens into rock; ash weathers into soil.

There is a deep, romantic appeal to all this geologic transformation. In a BBC news video from August, a woman confessed to having a little cry beside another Iceland volcano eruption. She had always dreamed of seeing lava, and now here it was. Drone footage of Fagradalsfjall in 2021 shows rivers of red flowing over the rocky landscape. It’s nighttime and the only colour is magma.

Volcano videos are popular on YouTube — one National Geographic volcanoes compilation appears to have almost as many views as some Shawn Mendes videos — and the most active have round-the-clock video monitoring, so you just might catch an eruption if you watch long enough. It is as if what we long for is a version of the Earth scorched into newness, erasing everything, even ourselves.

As the consequences of climate change loom near enough to see, it is arguably comforting to think that humans are not the only agents of destruction in the neighbourhood, and also that that destruction has been happening forever and the world has survived it. In January, the popular podcast “Radiolab” made the case that the worst year ever was not 2020 or 2021 but 536 CE. That year, a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland plunged the Northern Hemisphere into a cascade of disasters. Crops failed, people starved. The sun went out, and birds fell from the sky. See, the volcanoes tell us, we break things too sometimes. Just because everything’s dying doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world.

I’ve never been up close to a volcano, but the smell of “Hrafntinna” was familiar: Woodsmoke with a mineral edge (the gallery’s notes call it fossilized amber). It reminded me of what it’s like to be downwind from a forest fire. I was transported not to Iceland, but to a late summer trip to northern Ontario — giving a wide berth to fires that burned the rock bare — and to watching sparks blow onto California highways. I breathed it in and out, listening to the crackle of the speakers.

At the AGO, “Hrafntinna” rumbled, and a group of middle-school students on a field trip erupted in giggles, getting more of a kick out of the piece than the few adults on a sunny September morning. It was comforting, inside this imagined volcano. The recorded voice started to rise again; it sounded plaintive.

Since the 19th century, archeologists have made chalk and plaster casts of the victims of Mount Vesuvius — people and animals frozen where they died. You can tell which ones were caught in the volcano’s thermal surge because their toes are curled in agony. It is perhaps wiser to aspire to be smaller than volcanoes than to try and outdo them.

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