Works > Boiling Milk Solfataras

This photograph was taken in the north of Iceland in the geothermal pool of an active volcanic crater located along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at a site where the North American and Eurasian Tectonic Plates converge. This early ‘on site’ performative gesture is a touchstone for Halperin’s exploration of ‘geologic intimacy’, the relationship between the body and the earth.

How do you make contact with the inside of the earth? How do we form personal relationships with active geological processes? What is corporeal understanding? Frank Perret, an early volcanologist, monitored the seismic activity of Mount Vesuvius through clamping his teeth around the metal bedposts in his room, which were embedded in cement on the slopes of the volcano. Chattering teeth, chattering Earth. A volcano is like a body. It pumps lava throughout its system and breathes in and out through the mouth of a crater. A lava tube is like an artery coming out of the ventricle of a volcanic heart.

In Iceland every tap goes warm from geothermal heat, but there are so many steps between the volcanic chamber a mile under your feet and the mechanisms that bring hot water into your home, you forget there is a direct line reaching from below the earth’s crust to your cupped hands. So, I went to a local hardware store in Akureyri, got a small pan and some milk. Then I went to Mývatn, crouched at the edge of a boiling hot geothermal pool, and waited to see the milk begin to simmer. I asked a friend to go with me and, eventually, to take a picture. It was only later I learned that the Icelandic term for these types of pools is the ‘blue cooking milk’. Domestic deep time. That was in the summer of 1999 during my first artist residency in Iceland.