By Josie Anne Maltinsky Gaitens
Photos by Alicja Szulc
Art, Migration, and Shared Stories
The performance took inspiration from Luxenberg’s own time working as a cleaner in a remote hostel in Snæfellsnes, where she encountered a diverse group of individuals brought together by circumstances and shared struggles. Their stories, voices, humour, and isolation became the foundation of her artistic residency at Theatre 21.
“The people I spoke to, I had a feeling that many of them were outsiders of some description,” Luxenberg says. “A lot of them were searching for something in their lives that wasn’t just a job or money. They had a certain kind of melancholy, a struggle. They were isolated but perhaps they wanted—or needed—the isolation.”
Her performance was conducted in multiple parts. The first was a soundscape of recorded voices, the different migrant workers Luxenberg either laboured alongside, or got to know over the course of her stay in Iceland. This was followed by a ‘standup’ section, where she took to the stage to tell jokes and sing a variety of, “punk songs,” she had composed about her experience working at the hostel. The backdrop to this was a video of Luxenberg cleaning one of the hostel’s rooms, which took, from start to finish, 48 minutes, and ending with a short video-essay in the same manner as the opening section. Alongside this was a parallel installation of the recorded voices, allowing the audience to dig deeper into the content.
Creativity Inspired by Life
The final component of the performance was a role playing game (RPG) developed by Marjankowska, the goal of which was—to clean a hostel. Participants were given workers cards which described their personality and circumstances, and tasked with cleaning 12 rooms in 6 hours, paying with energy and mood to get the job done.
Marjankowska herself worked in essential jobs for a year and a half when she first came to Reykjavík, she cleaned hostels, hotels and domestic houses, and drew on her memories of this time to come up with scenarios for the game. “These experiences had high emotional content,” she says. “You remember them forever.”
Migration, Agency, and the Polish Worker
Polish economic migration to Iceland is well established; as of 2023, over 23,000 individuals of Polish origin resided in Iceland, making them the largest group of foreign inhabitants in the country. Considering the vastness of this community, it is in some ways surprising that the personal stories of Poles in Iceland are not more prominent in media and arts. These narratives, often shaped by themes of resilience, community, separation, and aspiration, remain largely untold, despite their potential to enrich Icelandic cultural discourse. The limited visibility of these stories underscores the broader challenge of representation for immigrant communities in the arts and public dialogue.
For Marjankowska, the workshop was a way to highlight the solidarity of workers and foster empathy among those unfamiliar with the migrant experience.
“In Union-speak this is called inoculation,” she says. “If you hear about the possibility of something, you can be prepared for it. You will recognise it if or when it happens to you. Otherwise, you just feel isolated.”
Inspired by the experience of designing and creating for this performance, Marjankowska intends to continue to develop the RPG to release as a product by the end of this year, perhaps to be used in language schools or similar. “This simple game is a scenario for a workshop and an important conversation starter,” she says.
Art as Reflection and Action
Luxenberg sees the importance of framing this for a Polish audience within Poland. She herself took the hostel job because of the low average pay for cultural workers in the country. She points out that even the artistic residency that allowed her to develop Aceland, paid half of what she earned as a cleaner for one month in Iceland
“When I came back people asked me a lot of questions about Iceland,” she explains. “Some people thought it was like a fantasy land, like ‘wow, it’s so beautiful, what did you see?’ Others wanted to go there to work too, and wanted to know how it was. I wanted to answer all of these questions on stage. I wanted to share the experience of isolation with people here, and show how it mirrors the feeling of isolation that is common among people from less privileged and marginalised groups in Poland. For those people, staying alive is a true survival—which was itself a leitmotif of the residency programme.”
Polish migration to Iceland is often framed through the lens of economic necessity, but this performance sought to uncover deeper truths—about identity, agency, and the pursuit of belonging in unfamiliar landscapes. By blending art, activism, and lived experience, the project not only illuminated the emotional texture of migration but also celebrated the resilience and creativity of those who carry these stories forward.
