{"id":7934,"date":"1970-01-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1970-01-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skaftfell.is\/natures-values\/"},"modified":"2025-08-19T17:37:29","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T17:37:29","slug":"natures-values","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skaftfell.is\/is\/natures-values\/","title":{"rendered":"Nature&#8217;s Values"},"content":{"rendered":"<pre>Philipp Valenta. 23rd Nov 2018 to 14th January 2019. West Wall gallery, Skaftfell Bistro.<\/pre>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Iceland\u2019s economy is becoming more and more dependent on tourism, a growing industry that offers the country\u2019s natural wonders as attractions to be consumed. In this context it seems hard to see these places and phenomena as \u201cpure nature\u201d any longer. Business thinking has creeped into the experiencing of natural wonders, and their locations suffer due to increased visitor numbers and lack of conservatory measures or funding. This ambivalence between the exploitation and the protection of a nature that is regarded as natural resource or \u201casset\u201d is currently highlighted by the rapid developments in the tourism sector, but it also has many interesting parallels in other parts of the economy that can be traced through Iceland\u2019s history and mentality. In <em>Nature&#8217;s values<\/em> Philipp Valenta shows two series of works relating to this theme, <em>S\u00edldar\u00e6vint\u00fdri <\/em>and <em>Herbarium<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><em>S\u00edldar\u00e6vint\u00fdri<\/em> relates to Iceland\u2019s so-called herring-adventure, the herring-boom that occurred between 1867 and 1968 in the North and East of the country. Valenta\u2019s herrings are made out of aluminium <span style=\"font-stretch: normal; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;\">\u2013 <\/span>the material of the new, booming industry in Iceland. The work points towards old and new, and apparently recurring, patterns in the use and exploitation of natural resources.<\/p>\n<p>For <em>Herbarium<\/em>, Valenta collected old and current banknotes of various countries and \u201cdissected\u201d their depicted flowers, creating a very specific kind of currency herbarium.\u00a0Many banknotes worldwide show very detailed illustrations of the countries\u2019 indigenous flora, for example blossoms that are representative of the region or climatic zone. In the German language the term Bl\u00fcten (blossoms) is used to describe counterfeit banknotes. For Valenta this linguistic connection underlines the artificial nature of money, represented by this particular collection of \u201cfake\u201d flowers.<\/p>\n<p><em>S\u00edldar\u00e6vint\u00fdri<\/em> relates to Iceland\u2019s so-called herring-adventure, the herring-boom that occurred between 1867 and 1968 in the North and East of the country. Valenta\u2019s herrings are made out of aluminium <span style=\"font-stretch: normal; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;\">\u2013 <\/span>the material of the new, booming industry in Iceland. The work points towards old and new, and apparently recurring, patterns in the use and exploitation of natural resources.<\/p>\n<p>Herbarium flowers:<\/p>\n<p>100 Cordoba, Nicaragua<\/p>\n<p>5 Sen, Japan<\/p>\n<p>10 Rupees, Sri Lanka<\/p>\n<p>1 Ringgit, Malaysia<\/p>\n<p>5 Ringgit, Malaysia<\/p>\n<p>10 Ringgit, Malaysia<\/p>\n<p>50 Cents, Sierra Leone<\/p>\n<p>10000 Kr\u00f3na, Iceland<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Philipp Valenta. 23rd Nov 2018 to 14th January 2019. West Wall gallery, Skaftfell Bistro. \u00a0 Iceland\u2019s economy is becoming more and more dependent on tourism, a growing industry that offers the country\u2019s natural wonders as attractions to be consumed. In this context it seems hard to see these places and phenomena as \u201cpure nature\u201d any [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skaftfell.is\/is\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skaftfell.is\/is\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skaftfell.is\/is\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skaftfell.is\/is\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skaftfell.is\/is\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skaftfell.is\/is\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7934\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skaftfell.is\/is\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skaftfell.is\/is\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skaftfell.is\/is\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}