A new design for a memorial to commemorate and honor the victims of a 2011 bombing and mass shooting that killed 77 people in Oslo and Utoya has been unveiled in Norway. The powerful memorial is being designed by Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg.
The proposed design will cut a small gap through headland on the island of Sorbraten, a peninsula not far from the island of Utoya.
This gap will serve as a “memory wound”, Dahlberg explained in his artist statement about the design.
Dahlberg told the architectural design site Bustler:
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.
“Across this channel,” he explained further, “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 purpose of this, Dahlberg explained is to acknowledge “what is forever irreplaceable.”
There is a second memorial planned by Dahlberg for Oslo, employing materials excavated from this site. The art selection committee for the design said that Dahlberg’s design “is capable of conveying and confronting the trauma and loss that the 22 July events resulted in in a daring way. The proposal is radical and brave, and evokes the tragic events in a physical and direct manner.”
(Article by M.B. David; image by Jonas Dahlberg)
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