Hatari - fólkið á bak við búningana (Hatari - The People Behind the Costumes; unfortunately geoblocked) is a 25-minute documentary about Hatari broadcast on RÚV, the Icelandic state broadcaster, on May 10th, prior to their Eurovision appearances. A longer documentary is being made that covers all of their Eurovision journey, but this shorter one is a taste, and it features interviews with both the guys and all the main people working with them, both on- and offstage. These interviews are pretty fun because, unlike the vast majority of Hatari interviews, they’re completely out of character here and just talking as their actual authentic selves.

On May 26th, I watched the documentary for the first time and translated for the Hatari Discord as I went along. Then I compiled what I’d written in the chat on Reddit. I’ve now (June 4th) rewatched the documentary, refined the translations and added some screenshots!



The documentary opens with the dancer-choreographers and costume designers describing their reactions to the announcement that they had won Söngvakeppnin (the Icelandic national final).

Dancer/choreographer/Einar’s wife Sólbjört describes how she didn’t actually hear when it was announced that they’d won. They had this bit planned where they’d all raise their SodaDream bottles in succession if they won, and she just saw Ástrós doing that and thought “Oh, okay, this is happening.”

Ástrós, who was supposed to be the first person to move if they won, just heard “Ha-” when they were making the announcement and went “Shit! Right foot forward!”

Andrean’s reaction was, quote, “Oh shit, what the fuck.” He had no idea how to react when people started congratulating him afterwards.

Costume designer/stylist Andri Hrafn Unnarsson’s reaction was “Okay, awesome… but what have I done.”

Costume designer Karen Briem was so stressed before the announcement that she wanted to punch a wall - being in this situation of not yet knowing what the next few months are going to be like was nail-biting. But she was thrilled! Previously, there’d been moments where she was just convinced Iceland was not ready for this, the world was not ready. And learning actually they were ready was great.

We move on from there to the guys talking about the origin of the band.

(Their titles there are “Klemens Hannigan: Musician and artist” and “Matthías Tryggvi Haraldsson: stage artist”.)



Matthías: “Klemens plays the guitar way better than me, so maybe I can just focus on writing lyrics.” [Klemens chuckles.] “That’s how Hatari started.” (Klemens is starting to say “No, we-” there over Matthías’s last line, but he’s cut off.)

Einar (”Musician and recording coordinator”): “It started in summer 2015 or so. Klemens had just started composing electronic music and showed me some demos, where he’d gotten his cousin Matti to try screaming some poems he’d written over it. It was very raw and rough and not very good. But it was new. It was something nutty that I hadn’t heard before, and I thought it was fun.”

Ronja Mogensen, dancer, artist and Klemens’s wife, describes how when she first became part of it, Matti and Klemens had only played one concert, and it was just playback off the computer. The first one she was actually there for was the first one with Einar as drummer. It had a very DIY feel. She was backstage painting Einar’s face black and putting a mask on him that she’d knitted(!). But very soon after that, things started to develop very quickly.

Graphic designer Ingi Kristján Sigurmarsson met Klemens at music festival Eistnaflug (in Neskaupstaður in eastern Iceland) in 2016. At the time, Klemens was traveling around the country, living out of his car. They ended up sitting on the mattress in the back seat as Klemens played all the Hatari demos for him - at that time, still very raw. They really hit it off, and they attended LungA together, where Ingi heard Hatari play for the first time. From there, they became friends, and started discussing some graphic framing for this project.

Karen Briem describes how about three years ago she was doing costumes for a dance festival, and Matthías was performing in that. He told her he was in this band and they kind of wanted some “suits” made (the Icelandic word is ‘galli’, which brings to mind something more like tracksuits than the English word). She asked what kind and he just said “Um, you know, just suits.”

So she went, “Okay, why don’t you come to my studio and send me one of your songs and we’ll talk about it.” They sent her a demo, and she was like “Wow, okay, this is… something new.” Then, when Matti and Klemens showed up in the studio, she realized within the first five minutes that this wasn’t a band, this was a performance art band. “It’s not just a guy coming to me wanting to look cute on stage.”

(This is the actual image juxtaposed with that line)



They spent an evening together talking about what they’re getting at, the ideas and philosophies and narrative underlying the band, developing these characters, and visually designing the “hierarchy” of the band. The first performance where they wore her costumes was when they were off-venue at Iceland Airwaves in 2016; the footage shown in the documentary here has them in bondage harnesses, but the performance she’s talking about seems to be this one, where they don’t quite seem to have had the BDSM thing going on yet beyond Einar’s mask; instead, Matthías and Klemens are both wearing military dictator-ish jackets.



(She does not talk about where the BDSM thing came from, but I’m just imagining them hanging out together talking about Hatari and their lyrics and somebody going “Okay, so, idea: how about we perform in nothing but straps of leather.”)

Ronja talks a bit about how there are a bunch of people who aren’t part of the band per se but hovering around them, dancers and opera singers and violin players, and you never know what might be next.

Sólbjört talks about how she first attended one of their shows at LungA 2016, presumably the same one Klemens and Ingi went to together; it was very different back then. In 2017, when she’d recently gotten together with Einar, the guys wanted to change up the live show and add dancers, so Einar asked her if she’d dance with them; Ronja was also a dancer, and they met up and agreed to dance, although the dancers have rotated a bit thanks to pregnancies and such.

Ástrós says she was friends with Sólbjört from the Academy of the Arts and they talked a fair bit on Facebook while Ástrós was an exchange student in Copenhagen, but they weren’t suuuuuper-close friends. Then one day Sólbjört asks her if she wants to participate in Eurovision.



Andrean also describes looking at his phone and seeing a message from Sólbjört about doing Eurovision with Hatari. A lot of thoughts went through his head, the first being no, because he’d already decided to boycott the contest. Hearing it was Hatari, though, he figured there had to be more to it than that. He ended up not even asking and just saying yes. He didn’t meet them until two weeks later, and the first thing they talked about when he walked through the door was how this was performance art hoping to provoke a discussion about important issues. And then he went "Yesss, awesome.”

Andri Hrafn says Karen Briem was a friend of his and they worked together a lot. She got him to come help because it was just getting to be a bit too much for one person, “too many straps”. He’s excited but stressed.

Ástrós talks about how they only get two rehearsals on the big stage and a lot is changing, but she’s not really worried about the performance so much as she’s worried about the media circus and everything around the contest.

We move on to talking about the band’s influences. Matti and Klemens list off their inspirations: Björk, Laxness, Sigur Rós, Ragnar Kjartans, Adam Curtis, Peaches, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Justice, Naomi Klein, Crystal Castles, Laibach, punk band Flux of Pink Indians, Ministry. Matti says he listened to Rage Against the Machine like a madman when he was a teenager, so that’s “somewhere in the genome”, as well as the whole concept of rebel music and how paradoxical it is, “being a modern privileged inhabitant of the West”. Then they talk about how the band sprung out of their dynamic as cousins and childhood friends, and how for as long as they can remember they’ve been in a constant dialogue and made up for each other’s weaknesses.

Andri Hrafn then talks about how Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo has for a decade now been bringing a philosophical approach to fashion, touching on gender issues and politics and capitalism, and that’s been very inspiring for him, “that somebody’s using this medium to express something other than just being cute.” He rarely gets to do this sort of thing within the fashion industry.



Sólbjört talks about not just being a dancer there to look good on stage. She’s very opinionated and not a submissive and voiceless woman, and it’s important people don’t read that into her work as an artist.

Ástrós says, “Yeah, anticapitalism, blah blah blah, but… I just think it’s incredibly humourous.” To illustrate, they show the clip of Matthías and Klemens from 12stig, where they’re asked if they’ve had any issues, and Matthías goes "The preparations are going according to plan!” and they simultaneously raise their hands in that strange robotic gesture, while everyone cracks up in the background.

Ingi Kristján talks about how the whole thing has kind of snowballed and become something totally different from when they started. Originally Hatari only appeared in their own media. When the “sellout moment” came, they sold themselves to their own company, Svikamylla ehf. When they had to finance the contest, they made their own sponsor, and when they wanted to control the discourse around themselves, they made their own news source. “So it’s on a lot of fronts by now.”

(This seems to be from when the whole group was meeting up and Ingi was presenting designs for SodaDream.)

We start to talk about politics. Matthías: “We try to talk about rulers, demagoguery, populism, image campaigns, and the malleability of public opinion, because public opinion can swing in disconcerting directions, as history has shown.”

Andri Hrafn says that there’s a lot of content to the performances that you can and should read politics into. He posits that good performance art can pose questions without necessarily answering them, and he feels that’s what Hatari is doing. They show a clip where Matthías says, “You kind of have to scream in order to be heard,” followed by a clip of the screaming from Ódýr.



Matthías talks about the tension of being well-intentioned, and wanting to empower some righteous cause, from within that middle-class privileged haze (he quotes the “sleepwalkers in the haze of habit” line that he sometimes does in the Dansið eða deyið intro). Getting to have this dream of being an artist and rising from the mediocrity and having your voice be heard is a privileged position, and basically a middle-class kid cliché. But that impulse sprouts from something in their background. Klemens adds, “We’re born into a certain position, and we’re criticizing that lifestyle that we live with.”

Matthías: “These contradictions that people have to live with, and live within, today are fascinating. When you want to be an environmentalist, and you’re living the most pollution-heavy lifestyle possible, but you feel okay about it for a moment when you choose a paper straw instead of a plastic straw. I think Hatari sprouts from these paradoxes of the modern Westerner.”

Karen Briem: “I’m interested in politics because I’m a part of society, and I think it’s a societal duty to be well informed. Even though I’m not hugely political in my daily life, I’m aware of what’s happening around me and try to form an opinion on it, based on the information that I have at the time.”

Einar: “The problem with our, or my, generation today is you’ve got very strong opinions on things, but you prefer to stay at home, in the comment systems, expressing your opinions from your couch, rather than than actually going out and doing something. And it’s people who don’t even vote - this is the reason for Trump and Brexit and all this crap happening today, lack of action.”

Andrean: “I think I as an artist have always been very political, because I’m such an activist myself. Ever since I was a child I’ve been burning to have an impact, improve the world and the society we live in. So I think that’s where my take on political art comes from. I went into art because I thought it could have an impact. And I still think so, and it really does.”

Karen Briem says costume design is a sort of visual sociology. You’re always telling a story; you don’t just do something for the hell of it. There’s got to be a reason for everything. To her, the whole artistry around it is there to support and convey the philosophical and political message.

They show some members of the Icelandic BDSM society. Einar says, “I think the most beautiful thing about all this is the normalization of this subculture.”

Klemens: “We’ve always toyed with deliberately going against what we’re expected to, like by starting out in the metal scene in Iceland, then connecting more with the rap scene, then moving on to getting the latte-drinking hipsters on our side. Going from announcing we’re only using our own media, to going on Facebook and Spotify, and founding our own news source, and creating Svikamylla ehf.. Doing an honest interview with me and Matthías announcing we’re done and then announcing we’re participating in Eurovision, which was perhaps the greatest betrayal of our biggest fans up until now.” Then he smiles awkwardly and it’s very cute.

Ingi Kristján: “We’ve gotten all sorts of comments from all sorts of directions, and one of the things that’s been thrown around is, 'What do people think they can change with art?’, that no one will ever have a real impact with an act like this, with this kind of ridiculous fooling around. It’s very important to me that it does matter, and it’s something that has an impact on society, and gets people to talk, and raises these kinds of questions. And that’s where these contrasts and these contradictions and paradoxes, and even especially the humour, are really important weapons.”

Matthías: “Success would be seeing political issues become a topic around Eurovision, issues that wouldn’t otherwise have been a topic in the same way. That is, if someone in Bulgaria or Denmark starts to look into serious issues, the situation with Palestine and Israel, when they wouldn’t have done it otherwise. And I think already people are discussing this in more depth because of the way we’ve put it on the agenda here at home. That would be a success.”

Then he talks about how this trip will be life-changing - for them, time’s probably going to be split into before and after the Eurovision trip. They’re going to experience a lot of things that are going to change their outlook on these things for good.

Sólbjört says: “You don’t want to be cocky and be like ‘We’re going to win this’. But I think, and I hope, that we’re going to get far - because by getting as far as possible, our message spreads further. I don’t know if we’re going to win this. But that’d be pretty funny. And fun.”

Einar: “I’m not going to have any expectations, and I don’t think it matters if we win this or not. That’s not why I’m doing this.”

This is immediately followed by:

Andri Hrafn: “We’re going to win this. Win Eurovision, for the first time for Iceland. That’d be a dream. That’d be something I’d be very proud of. I don’t really know what it’d mean for the country.”

Ronja: “It’ll be weird to be out there, regardless of why you’re there, when you know about what’s going on and about the discourse around it. But I’ll be there to support my friends, and my husband, and keep them grounded, as far as I can.”



Karen Briem: “As we see it, all of us, the performance starts at the airport when we set off. For every event that they do, whether it’s interviews or meet-and-greets or gala dinners, we need to make sure they can be there as Hatari. We need to stylize and layer things in a way where they can maintain their identities and their characters, but still fit with the events they’re attending. We’re not trying to offend anyone. We’re not there to shock everyone and do something crazy. We just want to get the message across in our way, visually, artistically and philosophically.”

Andrean: "I want to continue being this dangerous jester figure that we are, to create a discussion and make people think - both about the situation out there, and just about the situation of the 21st century, consumerism and so on.”

Klemens: “A victory would have by far the greatest agenda-setting powers. If we should win, we’d have the world’s attention - at least for a little while.”

And that’s the closing shot of the documentary! Hatari may not have won, but they sure did capture the world’s attention (and all of our hearts), didn’t they?

