What will you see when the ground slides away from your feet? What do you feel when you’re flooded by an inescapable sense of loss? What must you learn when everything you took for granted and, without any explanation vanishes? How do you engage in a mechanism of healing from trauma and irrationality? How do we consider what we learn from the loss of a life? How do we honour sacrifice without wanting more martyrs? Which legacy do you leave to the world of the living? Which roof do you shelter under when you think of the absence of a more inclusive and tolerant world? What is the role of national trauma? How can we explore trauma within the nature of loss? In what way can space force us to eliminate grief altogether, and perhaps craft an apology? As an emotional answer, these questions aim to touch the further limits of human absurdity in the mouths of millions of norwegians. But how can something such as an experience, or a place or even a memory abstract the paradigm of mourning into a pedagogy of collective healing?
The 22 July memorial is an opportunity for people, culture and history to come together and celebrate respect. Accompanied by a sense of belonging, mourning can finally surpass its limits, and the possibility of detraumatising a future becomes possible. To be free from fear is to face one trauma. The memorial needs to be a space of meditation and care for oneself and, as such, for the collective. Looking back into events must be seen as an act of courage, while looking forward must be considered as a crucial movement into love and resistance. An endless cycle of redemption and contamination sequences, piecing memory in a forever movement, a human movement. Trauma can rehabilitate our belief in humanity and become a tool for movement, strength and recognition. To think of a proposal that comes from a vision of death and monumentality is in itself a new trauma when both bad and good events can build a landscape of collective care. Let us start from a position of integration (not only of all the summoned agents of this human act, but also by giving the memorial an elegant sense of life and comfort for the living), through acts of humanity, through new stories of silence, meditation, as occasions of nostalgia, even laughter and conversation. This memorial is life itself, full of contradictory stages, full of comfort and discomfort, designed to be experienced with and without loss.
Sentimental concepts define the emotional space and conduct infinite volumetric experiences in each opportunity of redemption and contamination. A narrative made of the good and the bad, the end and the start, from Movement (and stillness), Light (and shadow), Water (and soil), Time (and timelessness), Amplitude (and narrowness). A story told by a space about facts, effects and consequences. The memorial must be experienced both from the inside out and also from the underground up as an immersive space, one that is in touch with people and all their senses. Touch: the space as a moving pavement, to experience a slight sense of disquiet, providing a gentle but significant meaning to the experience of restlessness. Vision: natural and artificial light as the elemental focus, as an immaterial ceiling, a border for the 77 names to exist as volumetric rays of calmness and contemplation. Hearing: the sound of nothingness, severed only by the sound of water from the Tyrifjord, from where bodies of memory will embrace the memorial.
Tools to answer the critical questions, invoking a sentimental strategy, processing trauma and loss, descending into emotional and sensory communication with unexpected realms of life. A penetrating design, a series of details and a narrative that will stand as the most beautiful asset in the undeniable destruction and damage. Respect for trauma, together with the need to process life upwards, is the motto while affecting the senses of each individual, inciting for their own way of mourning and perhaps, celebration.
See the project’s official page here.
