Peter Schjeldahl contemplates Norway’s canceled controversial memorial

2017-07-28T15:42:00-04:00

What had the land done to deserve being fissured? Local residents protested that they were traumatized enough by the killer’s passage among them not to suffer a daily reminder of it, thronged by tourists. Some families of victims refused the use of their loved ones’ names, which are already enshrined on a modest monument—a suspended silver ring, in the woods—on Utøya. Last month, Norway officially canceled the project.

Memory Wound, a bold proposal by the Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg, won a government competition for a memorial dedicated to the seventy-seven victims of a massacre committed by Andres Breivik on July 22, 2011. The artist's design called for cutting a channel across the Sørbråten peninsula, near the island of Utøya, where Breivik fatally shot sixty-nine at a summer camp and moving the excavated stone to the site in Oslo where, on the same day, a bomb that he had planted killed eight. The gap was to be faced with stone and engraved with victims' names.

Last month, due to much controversy, Norway officially canceled the project. The proposal struck some as, for one thing, an offense to blameless nature. Contrasting the project to Vietnam Memorial and Ground Zero, Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker points out the failure of Memory Wound, "Monuments aren’t churches. The most affecting ones enable but don’t seek to impose, fitting emotional responses. Dahlberg’s proposal, by contrast, ...

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Peter Schjeldahl contemplates Norway’s canceled controversial memorial