Augun mín og augun þín

Augun mín og augun þín (My Eyes and Your Eyes) is a work in progress. At the dawn of the 19th century, three young women poets from the north of Iceland each suffered great heartbreak and responded in very different ways: Guðný frá Klömbrum, Vatnsenda-Rósa and Agnes Magnúsdóttir.

Guðný’s husband could not bear her intelligence and left her. She was overcome by grief and died within a year. Agnes was betrayed by her lover and filled with such rage that she killed him, paying for it with her own life. Rósa lost her first love to another woman but worked her way through the grief, regained her strength, educated herself, travelled and finally found love again.

Life is life, and no one gets through it unscathed, as the stories of these three women show. But what interests me is how differently they responded to similar blows, for that is where their paths divide. Agnes and Guðný lost their lives around thirty, while Rósa the poet lived an eventful and rewarding life into her seventies.

The piece will bring both their stories and their poems to life, looking back in time but also seeing their experience in a universal light and connecting it to the present.

María Ellingsen is doing the research and shaping the piece together with Kevin Kuhlke. Set designer Snorri Freyr Hilmarsson is working with them on the visual concept in parallel.