Hasta La Ideas

On July 22nd, 2011, Norway suffered two horrific back-to-back attacks on civilians. A lone extremist killed eight people with a car bomb and injured 209 in Oslo; within hours he’d then opened fire at a summer camp at Utøya island, killing 69 and wounding 110. The attacks were particularly personal in relatively tiny Norway, where a reported one out of every four Norwegians knew at least one of the victims.

KORO/Public Art Norway, the government’s arm for public art and the largest art producer in the country, subsequently held a design competition to erect a memorial to honor the victims. The recently-announced winner, by unanimous jury vote, was artist Jonas Dahlberg and his beautiful two-part concept seen here. The first part of the memorial, called “Memory Wound,” is to be sited on a tiny peninsula of land at the village of Sørbråten, near Utøya island. Explains Dahlberg:

My concept for the Memorial Sørbråten proposes a wound or a cut within nature itself. It reproduces the physical experience of taking away, reflecting the abrupt and permanent loss of those who died. The cut will be a three-and-a-half-meters-wide excavation. It slices from the top of the headland at the Sørbråten site, to below the water line and extends to each side. This void in the landscape makes it impossible to reach the end of the headland.

Visitors begin their experience guided along a wooden pathway through the forest. This creates a five to ten minute contemplative journey leading to the cut. Then the pathway will flow briefly into a tunnel. This tunnel leads visitors inside of the landscape and to the dramatic edge of the cut itself.

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