In the north of Tunisia is a former fishing village where the buildings are uniformly white and blue, and the quiet is pierced with a Muslim call to prayer five times daily. It’s awkward to get to, so of course Björk found it by accident—not by land, but by sea. In 2006 she had bought a boat at the bottom of Europe, maybe Croatia; she can’t remember. It was something like out of National Geographic, she says—“a small, fat boat, kind of like the Land Rover of boats, made to sail through ice.” This boat would become her home for three years, but soon after she bought it, something broke. Looking at the map, the closest place to go for help was the marina not far from where we’re currently sitting. “I walked up here, and I was like, What the fuck?”

When Björk talks about Sidi Bou Saïd it’s like she dreamed it. In fact, having spent years telling friends about finding “the best village in the universe,” she came back five years ago to confirm that she hadn’t. There are no cars here, apart from those belonging to the few tourists who’ve insisted on driving there and gotten stuck. The driver of my dusty, seatbelt-less taxi dropped me at the edge of the village, wordlessly slapped his thighs, and pointed to the narrow streets, a gesture that said, You’re on foot from here. Up twisting alleys and stone steps so worn by centuries of feet they look bowed, I find Björk: an Icelander in winter, delirious with African sunlight. She wears a high-neck, asymmetrical dress in multicolored pastel and neon, with jet black hair, messy eyeliner, layers of red lace tights, and—despite the perilously San Franciscan angle of the cobbled streets—camel-colored platform tabis. A swan dress may have stood out on the red carpet in 2001, but here among the stray cats she looks beamed down from space. This is Björk on vacation.

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