We Shoot Pins (2020)

We Shoot Pins contains one long poem in 22 chapters, written between 2016 and 2020, mostly in airports and hotel rooms. It’s a raging social critical poem that takes on the good life of people in the West, that have sealed themselves off from the rest of the world and its problems, all the while continuing their exploitation of it. As citizens of the good life countries, we still have our conscience to cope with, but more and more we have managed to outsource our dilemmas by pushing the like button on social media in support of all good causes.

To accompany the book Helgason rehearsed some chunks of it with one of Iceland’s best drummers, Doddi Þorvaldsson. Out of those sessions grew an independent reading performance of 30 minutes. With the aid of Krassasig, the most sought after director of music videos among the young generation of Icelandic musicians, Hallgrimur and Doddi produced a video of the performance, a “poetry video”, that was shot in the Reykjavik Art Museum on July 1st 2020 and broadcasted on Icelandic state run TV channel RÚV November 17th 2020. https://www.ruv.is/sjonvarp/spila/vid-skjotum-tituprjonum/30931