Art and Memorialization of Cultural Trauma. The Case of Utöya, Norway.

Summary, in English

This paper takes its point of departure in the planned, but later stopped, memorial over the Utöya massacre in Norway. The suggested memorial called Memory Wound was designed by Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg and would in reality become two memorials, one at Utöya and one in Olso. Examining the debate that eventually led to the cancellation of the planned memorial project, the paper raises questions on how we are to memorialize cultural trauma in terms of processes of public memory and history. Cultural Trauma typically occurs when a collective been subjective to events of such a character that it marks their collective memory, asks questions about their common identity that may in turn have an impact on their future identity. In the process of formulating and overcoming cultural trauma different carrier groups are at stake about the outcome of that process including how the trauma should and could be remembered and become a part of public and collective history. Artists and artwork play an important part of the constitution of public memory in relation to memorialisation of cultural trauma and how it eventually becomes a part of a collective’s common past and how it is understood in retrospective and there are numerous examples of how artists contribute to this process. However, as the Artists suggests of presents such works, controversies are commonly raised and issues beyond mere artistic expressions comes at stake. In the discussed case, it becomes evident that artistic expressions of collective traumas may be interpreted as controversial and even stopped. As this is not always the case (there are for instance numerous more conventional memorials of Utöya that not at all got the same attention and stirred the same controversy) the nature of the controversy also says something of the nature of the difficulties in formulating the memorialization of trauma as such.

• Author: Magnus Ring
• Department/s: Sociology; ST - the Union of Civil Servants
• Publishing year: 2018
• Language: English
• Pages: 35-35
• Document type: Conference - other
• Topic: Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Anthropology, Demography and Criminology)
• Conference name: 10th midterm Conference of the European Research Networks Sociology of the Arts & Sociology of Culture
• Conference date: 2018-09-04 - 2018-09-07
• Status: Published