During the construction period, the building appears in its rawest form. BENEFIT – A Reflection on Materials deals with a complex and controversial state project in innumerable layers. The images capture the genesis of a building, the biggest building project in Iceland's history, and the attraction of the moment when everything is quiet and the dust settles.
The building is like a skinless creature that breathes and sounds, gathering strength before the storm. Water, the only native substance, seeps up from cavities and gropes foreign substances. Mixed with Danish cement, cast steel from Belarus has traveled four thousand kilometers. Two hundred and eighty thousand cubic meters of minerals have been removed from the site and now expand the coastline in the form of landfill. We can see deep into the vast dimensions of the structure. Light flows through dark spaces underground. The camera captures raw surfaces, intricate nerve endings, and multi-layered structures. Half-spoken sentences hint at the beauty in the nature of things. This beauty lies behind the outermost layer of skin, which will eventually be covered. The beauty in the combination of materials and colors, nerves and tendons, rhythm and textures, muscles and bones, light and shadow, form and space.
