The first thing you notice is the row of open windows, tilting out from the walls of a black wooden cabin that stands enshrined in a temple-like pavilion on the island of Utøya. They are the windows through which teenagers jumped, fleeing the bullets of Anders Breivik, who murdered 19 students inside this small café building, before scouring the rest of the island to kill a further 50.
Five years after the event that shook the very foundations of Norway’s national identity, the site of the July 22 massacre — the deadliest ever shooting by a single gunman in history (who also killed eight more people in Oslo with a car bomb earlier that day) — has been transformed into a place that tells the story with stark, stirring power.
The café building now stands like a piece of forensic evidence in this woodland vitrine, chopped and sliced in a process of architectural editing, so that only the rooms relevant to the events of that day are left standing. You climb the crumbling concrete steps, where dried weeds still poke through the cracks, to enter a small room with a lino floor and low suspended ceiling. A piano stands in the corner — some of the victims tried in vain to hide behind it.
A few tiny bulletholes mark the flimsy fibreboard walls; dried flowers lie strewn across the floor; a door leads to a row of toilet cubicles, where a number of survivors huddled together in safety. It’s a prosaic and familiar set of rooms, still furnished with the classroom ephemera — an overhead projector, a pot plant, some wall hangings — that only serve to emphasise the extraordinary and inexplicable nature of what happened here.
“We wanted to present the bare facts,” says Erlend Blakstad Haffner, architect of the island’s new memorial building and learning centre. “The choices of that day were hide, flee or die. We had to tell this dark story — but it is also a story of survival.”
It is a story that has been a fraught one to get right. Haffner’s original proposal — developed with the Workers’ Youth League (AUF), which has held its summer camps on the island for the last 60 years — was to remove all trace of the existing buildings and erect new ones. “They wanted to tear everything down and totally erase the memory of what happened,” he says. “It was too traumatic for them to keep any reminders.”
The challenge was to let it exist and not exist at the same time.
But the parents of the victims, who were sidelined in these early discussions, had other ideas. To destroy the only surviving trace of the place where their children died was too much too soon. “It seems the AUF did not understand the force of grief,” said Åsne Seierstad, author of a bestselling book about the massacre, when the summer camp first returned to the island last year. “For traumatised young people, it was all about moving on. That mistake destroyed a lot.”
After a period of reflection and consultation, involving a panel of advisers from New York’s September 11 Memorial Museum and the Pentagon Memorial, the proposals were scaled back and a compromise found in the form of the Hegnhuset. Roughly translated as “safeguarded house” (protecting both the building and the democratic ideals it embodies), the pavilion shields views of the café structure from those who don’t want to be reminded, while framing it in a direct, matter-of-fact way within. As Haffner puts it: “The challenge was to let it exist and not exist at the same time.”
A screen of 495 wooden posts marches around the outside of the building, marking the number of survivors of the attack, and forming a cloistered walkway between the outer and inner façade where 69 structural columns symbolise the number who died here. The double layer enclosure serves to baffle the café building from the outside and casts a wash of dappled light inside, where a small exhibition space has been carved out of the sloping ground beneath the timber cabin.
With its roof and walls sliced right through, left with rough exposed edges as if cut by the chainsaw of Gordon Matta-Clark, the Hegnhuset has a rawness that feels perfectly judged. “We didn’t want the sense of trauma to be too overexposed,” says Haffner. “The facts are just there for your own experience and interpretation.”
Rotated off-axis with the charged relic it houses, the Hegnhuset is aligned with a new cluster of barn-like buildings that stand nearby, providing spacious facilities for the camps and other conferences held here, in a loose courtyard arrangement. A dining room, auditorium and library enjoy lofty nine-metre high pitched-roof spaces, where tall bookshelves brim with volumes by Marx and Mandela, Tito and Trotsky — who spent the summer of 1936 on the island, after fleeing Stalin and winning asylum in Norway.
It is a radical heritage that has made Utøya (which appropriately means “outer island”) something of an outsider in this traditionally conservative region. The Oslo Trade Union Confederation acquired the island in 1933 and later donated it to the AUF, transforming it from the holiday home of a former Conservative minister into a place where future Labour leaders would cut their political teeth.
These ideological differences with the mainland have made attempts to commemorate the events of July 22 even more delicate. The winning and widely praised proposal for a memorial to cut a dramatic slice through the Sørbråten peninsula as a “symbolic wound” has been held up by local protest and now looks unlikely to go ahead. Local residents, led by rightwing politician Jørn Øverby, have threatened to sue the state, claiming the proposal — by Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg — breaches their human rights and constitutes a “rape of nature”. In a depressing victory for nimbyism, this month the government announced it was willing to drop the proposal to reach a settlement with the group.
A more low-key memorial on the island, designed by Bergen-based architects 3RW, thankfully suffered no such obstacles. A big steel ring hovers at head height, suspended from the trees in a clearing overlooking the water, inscribed with the names of the victims. When the mist pours in from the fjord, the water condenses and the steel weeps.
Visitors to Utøya might well find themselves doing the same. But the overall message is one of optimism: that life goes on here, more reinvigorated than ever. “It has been reaffirmed as a place for young people to come and engage in democratic debate, culture, sports, friendship and love,” says Haffner — perhaps no more evident than in the “lover’s trail” that loops around the island.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
