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.
Visitors will be on one side of a channel of water created by the cut. Across this channel, on the flat vertical stone surface of the other side, the names of those who died will be visibly inscribed in the stone. The names will be close enough to see and read clearly—yet ultimately out of reach. The cut is an acknowledgement of what is forever irreplaceable."
The second part of the memorial, called "Time and Movement," is to be sited in Oslo, and constructed using the soil removed from the first site:
My concept then transfers the natural material excavated from the cut at the Memorial Sørbråten. In an active and poetic gesture, it uses the material as the foundation upon which the Temporary Memorial is formed, as well as later for the Permanent Memorial. The natural material includes 1000 cubic meters of stone from the cut. It also includes the trees and plant life gathered from the cut and from the creation of a pathway through the forest.
This very specific topography symbolizes those who were lost on July 22, 2011. I am proposing to use the natural materials to create a memorial walk. The walk considers how movement and the passage of time are important elements in the process of grief , memory, and growth. The Temporary site lies next to an existing walkway. People use it every day to travel to and from Akersgata and Grubbegata. The memorial walk will lead pedestrians slightly off of their regular path. It physically relates to the interruption that occurred in the everyday life flow of Norwegian society—yet it is indeed everyday life that must carry on, in a fully conscious manner.