Doc : Doc — Emma Geiger on Family History, Following an Idea, and “Til Íslands”

Emma Geiger stands in a field in Iceland holding a Super 8 camera. She tells us about the process and persistence behind Til Íslands (“To Iceland”), a new exhibition.

In Til Íslands, artist Emma Geiger returns to the Icelandic landscape her great-great-grandparents left behind in 1888. Last summer, with support from the Cassilhaus Biannual Travel Fellowship, she spent several weeks in Iceland connecting with distant relatives and working across mediums to explore ancestry, place, and environmental change.

Drawing on time spent at her family’s farm on Lake Apavatn and in a residency in Skagaströnd, the exhibition brings together still and moving images alongside phytograms made with plants, seaweed, and wool, and a quilt naturally dyed with lupine, rhubarb, and lichen. Across these materials, Til Íslands reflects a delicate process of becoming reacquainted with a landscape and a history after a long separation.

Geiger now returns to Duke to present this new work. An alum of the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts, her exhibition is on view in the Kreps Gallery at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) from June 10 – October 2. Join us for the opening reception on Friday, June 12, 4–6 p.m. at CDS to meet the artist. 

This conversation is part of Doc : Doc, an interview series from CDS, where we talk shop with documentary artists and explore the evolving field of nonfiction storytelling. Through candid conversations, we illuminate the creative process and highlight the programs that make it all possible.

Q: How did this project come about?

Geiger: It had been a project on my mind for a long time. I did an amazing one-semester program at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies at the Maine College of Art in 2018, and at the end we had to pitch a project we wanted to do in the future. And I remember pitching the project that I’ve done now, and the response being like, this isn’t very fleshed out and you have a lot of work to do on this pitch. And I remember feeling like, this is such a good idea, I really want to do this project. 

So since then, I’ve known that at some point I wanted to go to Iceland and connect with family members that I didn’t yet know. My great, great grandparents were from Iceland and came to New Jersey in 1888, but I didn’t have much family context about them or about what their lives were like there. That curiosity drove me to want to go and explore and learn about that side of the family.

Q: Did you use some of that original pitch to apply for the Cassilhaus Biannual Travel Fellowship? 

Geiger: I revisited that pitch and spent a long time fleshing out the ideas. I’d also gone to Iceland for the first time in 2024, just for a couple of weeks with my family and partner, and we visited and met some family there. So I had some information from that trip to put into the application.

I was also reading some Icelandic books at that point, particularly by Andri Snær Magnason, who just showed a film at Full Frame based on his book, On Time and Water. That was a big inspiration for me. It’s about family history and climate change and time on the geologic and personal scale, and how all those things fit together. It made me feel like, oh, I can do a project about family history. Sometimes I feel like that gets a rap for being unimportant or just personal. Reading that book gave me some confidence to explore my curiosities more.

Q: What were you originally hoping to communicate to viewers?

Geiger: Having the grant from Cassilhaus allowed me to stay in Iceland for an extended period of time, which otherwise that’s a really hard thing to do, to leave your job or your life and go for a few months. I learned a lot and gained a lot of appreciation for my own family history.

I wanted to share that experience with others and maybe inspire other people to explore their own past. It made me think about my own place in the timeline of life on Earth differently. Because you can think back a few generations and realize, oh, that was actually very recent. And you think about the future more, and that makes you think about how you’re spending your life and how you’re making an impact on the world. It’s a good perspective to get out of being stuck in a really narrow present.

Q: How does this exhibition build on or differ from your previous work?

Geiger: I haven’t shown photography in this kind of setting, which I’ve always wanted to do. So that’s exciting. But yeah, the past few years I’ve been focusing on music, and for my MFA I did a combination of music and 16mm film, so it’s also related.

It felt nice to be able to incorporate a lot of the different mediums that I’ve been playing with for the last few years, having some textile in the exhibition and natural dyeing, moving images, and also stills. I’m also building frames for all the photos, which I feel kind of crazy for doing because I don’t have much woodworking experience. But a generous friend and carpenter, Mark Ogelsby, helped me through the process.

Q: What advice do you have for people that are interested in pursuing a documentary project but just getting started?

Geiger: Much the same as the advice I’d give myself: if you don’t have a final product or a thing you’re making in mind, that’s okay, and you can just start documenting. You can record conversations if other people are okay with that, or field recordings. There are so many ways of documenting, like journaling. Just start gathering material and then at some point maybe the material will show itself to want to be something. But yeah, you don’t have to know.

Q: Climate change impact is an undercurrent in the exhibition. What do you hope viewers notice and take away?

Geiger: I think I want it to be something that comes up as a sort of question when people are interacting with the work. It’s not directly showing climate change necessarily, but it’s just showing a place that is rapidly changing, especially with glaciers that are disappearing. And I think people are maybe more in touch in Iceland — being around glaciers and volcanoes and on an island, they’re just so much more in touch with the physicality of nature where I think here sometimes it can feel a little more distant. So I think that closeness is what I want to show and hope that feeling engages people a little bit with what’s at stake.

All images courtesy Emma Geiger