Creative Time Summit | Nationalisms: Jonas Dahlberg

Today I will talk a bit about my concept of making the memorial to honor the victims of the 22nd of July terror attack in Norway. As most of you know, it started with the bombing in Oslo where eight people were killed. The same man that detonated the bomb then traveled 24 minutes, or 44 minutes, to Utøya where he then murdered 69 people, mostly kids between 14 and 21 years old. They were part of the summer camp of AUF, the Labour Party's youth group, that are the ones that are on this island. The reason for the terror act was that he wanted to kill future leaders of the social democratic or the Labour Party. The memorial site is placed on the tip of a peninsula that reaches out into the water. The memorial site was chosen by the government. In Norway you are taken to the memorial site by a small road, and they will establish a parking space a little bit north of the memorial site, with the idea that you should walk in. The idea was that the visitors to the memorial are supposed to walk in on the side of the field, quite straight from the parking lot, the sort of shortest cut into the memorial site. My concept is formed from two emotional observations from actual site visits to both Utøya and to the actual memorial site. The concept that takes its starting point from the site visitors may be a more political side of the concept, and the concept that takes its starting point from the site visit to the memorial site is maybe the more private part of it, which more relates to the actual visitors. In that sense, we were taken, all of us a group of the people that were in the competition, the architecture firms and artists, were taken to Utøya and were taken on a tour by one of the survivors from that day. She took us in the footsteps of the killer and took us from place to place where someone had died, and talked about the people who had died and how they had died, and talked about how it was that day at that moment. One of the first stops we did was that we stopped at the main building where a lot of people got killed. It was like, we walked in, none of us were prepared for the emotions that would appear. We walked in and there were gun holes in the walls, the carpet was bleached from cleaning products trying to clean away the blood, and it was really hard to breathe in there. Some started to cry. It was a little bit like walking in an open wound; it was like it happened yesterday. Then we were taken out on a route in nature around the island and stopped at positions or places where people had died. What I noticed there was that it was suddenly easier to breathe, even when standing on places where a lot of people lost their lives. So this took me, or started later on, to make me think: since the memorial site is situated in nature, I started to think about the idea that I should let nature heal to the level that it can, so nature can move on. Then after this visit, we went to the memorial site. We were taken from the actual tip at the memorial site where you have a really picture-perfect setting. This shapes my other side of the concept: I decided that I didn't want that case to be possible. I wanted to stop that movement that is with you already from when you are in the car, the need of seeing it. The actual memorial site making that movement even stronger since it is on this tip reaching out to the water—you're supposed to go out to the water, all the way out to the tip, and you should stand and look there on the island, which makes the observer or the visitor to the memorial site become like a passive observer, and it makes it like a monument in itself. I didn't want to allow that. So the first thing I started doing to try to change this sequence of movement was that I proposed a different pathway from the parking lot, walking through the forest instead. Then I started with an idea to try to block the gaze out towards the island. From the beginning I had something out in the water, and it didn't feel like it worked out so well, so I started to move that into the actual peninsula so it cut off the actual sight itself, so you can't reach the memorial site. I was not so sure about the idea of creating, or I didn't want to create, some sort of monument or architecture in itself, or some sort of design. So I started to play with the idea again to bring up this idea with the wound that came from the site visit to Utøya, and started to play with the idea of moving the monument down into the ground instead, and at the same time moving the movement down so I blocked the view. This creates the sort of shape of the memorial. Here we have the memorial with a parking lot and a pathway through the forest, and the cut. The memorial in itself proposes a cut in nature that makes a break in nature, like what happened, a cut in everyday life. It deals with loss in a way that is not abstract; rather than illustrate loss, it makes actual loss. Rather than make an actual distance, it makes distance. It creates an island where you can't reach the tip of the memorial. You are taken by the bypass way through the forest, taken down to the ground, taken to the actual dramatic cut where you see the names on the other side. It's a three and a half meter cut, and you see the names inscribed in the wall on the other side. You can reach or you can see them, you can read them, but you can't reach them, so they are forever unreachable. I can also mention very briefly that the material, the stone which I take away, is used for constructing the memorial sites in Oslo in the governmental quarters. Okay.

No, but that's probably true. The idea with the cut, from that point of view, is to sort of exclude everybody, in that sense, and to turn the gaze inward yourself instead. So we all have experienced loss in some way, we all have experienced the vulnerability of not being able to do something. And so the idea with a cut is to sort of exclude the possibility, or that sort of belief in order release of what you're saying, that it is possible maybe, and turn it inside yourself, to reflect on these issues and to keep that dialogue sort of going on for the future. Thank you very much.