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, risked being coercive; its conceptual complexity had an effect of exalting the artist as a maestro of mourning. Its cancellation leaves an object lesson. By crossing lines of propriety, “Memory Wound” scouted where and what the lines may be."