Fourteen years ago, the heart of Oslo was reconfigured by hate. On 22 July 2011, Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Behring Breivik detonated a car bomb outside the office of the then prime minister Jens Stoltenberg, killing eight people and damaging surrounding buildings, before murdering a further 69 people on the nearby island of Utøya.
But now the same site is to be reconfigured by hope. Last week, after a multi-round, three-year-long selection process, a jury of curators, politicians, artists and representatives of the victims and survivors of the attacks announced the winning design for a new Norwegian national memorial to be unveiled in time for the 15th anniversary in 2026.
Norwegian artist Matias Faldbakken’s mosaic Upholding, 12 metres high and 15 metres wide, and made of some 500,000 stones, shows a wading bird native to Utøya reflected in the lake. It is a monumental piece that touches on both societal support and nature.
And a mosaic, Faldbakken argues, is the perfect symbol for a memorial site. “A fragmented image, every part plays its role. In old literature, it’s called painting for eternity. A mosaic is one of the only image formats that survives fire, earthquakes and floods.”
The mosaic will be braced by a steel rig similar to the one that once secured Pablo Picasso’s mural The Fishermen on one of the blast-damaged blocks in the quarter. Faldbakken, who represented Norway at the Venice Biennale in 2005, explains that he was initially inspired by walking past the rig holding Picasso’s work, which stood in the Government Quarter for almost three years.
But the main purpose of the monument is not to reference the work of another artist but to serve as “a window to the other crime site”, explains Faldbakken. After triggering the Oslo blast, Breivik travelled to the island of Utøya in Tyrifjorden, a lake 40km northwest of Olso, where he attacked a summer camp for the Labour party’s youth wing (AUF). Most of the 69 victims were teenagers.
“I was out on the island many times,” Faldbakken says. “I started to research the birds. And this small wader had a lot of physical traits that I thought worked: a very small, fragile and light bird with its thin legs. But it has this angle to it. It has a gaze. It pushes you a little bit back.”
On Faldbakken’s last visit to Utøya, the lake was completely still, the water a mirror, which inspired the bird’s reflection in the design. It is not meant as a clear symbol of life and death. “This is a very peaceful image but it is almost like a Rorschach test. It has this duality,” he notes. “Breivik was a homegrown terrorist, which mystified this country at the time. There’s that serene Scandinavian facade, and yet there’s the terror underneath.”
Survivors and the relatives of those killed will be involved in placing the stones into the composition. The names of the 77 people who died will be engraved on the base of the work.
Regitze Schäffer Botnen, who was a 17-year-old participant at the Utøya camp on 22 July, was a member of the jury. Initially she felt that she was representing all the survivors, “And then I realised that is an impossible task. So, I figured out that I had to dig deeper into the subject and listen to other survivors and people who lost their children, and ask the question not what do you like the most but what is a good memorial? To see what kind of conversation that started, and learn from it.”
The transparency and public engagement in the selection process was in part a result of the backlash against a rushed commission for a memorial on Utøya island in 2014. The chosen work, Jonas Dahlberg’s Memory Wound, proposed a permanent three-and-a-half metre gap be cut through the island. The concept was considered by many as memorialising one act of violence with another, and the project was subsequently dropped. “It didn’t have the grounding of what we’re doing now,” Faldbakken says, tactfully. “And it was very much in the backyard of many people who lived close to Utøya, and were the people who took out their boats and saved the kids.”
In 2012, Breivik received a 21-year-sentence, the longest that can be handed down in Norway. “He might theoretically walk past the memorial a free man some time in the future, but it is highly unlikely,” says Thomas Ugelvik, a professor of law at Oslo University. Breivik received a forvaring sentence, which is indeterminate. If he still poses a threat to society the sentence can be extended, potentially for the rest of his life.
Arguably, the greatest memorial to 22 July would be the impossibility of such an attack happening again. “We have a greater focus on emergency preparedness than we did before the attack, as well as many safety measures around governmental buildings and critical infrastructure,” says Jens Stoltenberg, who went on to become general secretary of Nato and is now finance minister of Norway. “But no measure can serve as a guarantee against terrorism or extremism. In that sense a memorial is important as a constant reminder of something we would never want to experience again, and that our free and open society can never be taken for granted.”
In the wake of 22 July, led by a public address from Stoltenberg, Norwegians came together. Thousands of people participated in a “rose march” the following week, walking from the town hall to Oslo Cathedral holding roses in defiance of extremism. Faldbakken was in the US at the time of the attacks, but two of his children were in Oslo. “It had an echo in our family life, because the kids were really shocked by it. I jumped on the first plane and came back.”
Having to take so many peoples’ views and feelings into account while designing the memorial was a very different practice for Faldbakken. “I stood on the side as an artist and thought I’d make the best work I can based on this idea. Pretty early on I took myself and my artist’s ego out of the equation. It was not about me any more; it was about them.”
