[Re] Mapping of Being – Landscape/Cavescape/Humanscape

Nina Tsy, Nataliia Korotkova (IIAKO)

This exposition opens up the memory space of a landscape that carries a collective knowledge of the events of the Second World War in Sørøya, an isolated region far in northern Norway. Inside its landscape voids, the island conceals places that once became a refuge for half of the region’s inhabitants. In this research project, artists ask themselves what collective memory is and how the landscape opens up an alternative public space in its own depths. How do the caves of the island of Sørøya carefully hide and preserve the memory of the events of the Second World War, and how do these events fade into the shadows of Norway’s inhabitants’ social memory? This exposition shows one chapter of our ongoing research project Dunke-Dunk, where the landscape is becoming the cavescape and the cavescape is becoming the humanscape through the artists’ long field trips to the region, their bodily immersion in caves, and an endless evagation searching for what preserves the memory of the touch of the Second World War through the [re]reading of archives, all the while collecting stories from the inhabitants and the terrain from an architectural and artistic perspective.

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> RESEARCH CONTENT

If one day you could sing a song to the cave, read prose, compose poetry – share something that would mean some kind of gathering ritual.

You would not go into the cave that day, you would build some distance between the recess and yourself, you would tell the place about yourself or about yourself in the place, maybe about how this place became a place for you, or how you became this place.

We often accept and adapt places to ourselves as people who once arrived from the spaces of cities. Our recesses there are like repositories of our desires, needs, illusions, and ideas about ourselves.

Deepening in isolated places neither waits for nor repels a person. These places are located in the depths of the landscape, they hold rich history, stories about the touch of the wind and the sea, about the touch of the sea and stone, about the touch of time and sky, about how water circulates, where the sea returns in the evenings, about how once people took refuge inside, coexisted in hidden landscapes of places where people are now on the surface of the soil again –not inside it.

Sørøya/22

Moving for the sake of moving is a very poetic undertaking, so I would like to leave some mark here about the home and about the place where there is a sense of belonging, where there is that point from which and to which you return.

This place is kept among the layers of stones, hundreds of levels below, where only the sea allows you to tell if there is a chance to return.

May the recess in the stones be the very place that the body is able to trust, the place where time acquires infinity, at a time when time is the reference point of a kind of belonging, of a kind of poetics of being.

Sørøya/22

The recesses are not similar to the body, just as the body is not like the recesses. The recesses are layers of memory that once possessed physicality, that once lost touch with generations.

Sørøya/22

The layering of the terrain with each step returns to the idea that the former time of this place may one day return; one day the house-dweller will again become a cave-dweller, one day moving in the dark will be our only method of communication, one day contact with the stone will be warm, and contact with people alien.

Many steps through the layering of stones do not answer the questions that haunted many steps back.

Layering envelops, tightens, awakens awareness of the moment of the present, which strangely interweaves fragments of history with no bodily memory left.

Many steps as a continuation of the path beg the body to stop remembering, plead with it to merge with the layering of the stone, to stop leaving traces, to leave the opportunity for the body to find the boundaries of space, becoming one who is no longer human but rather simply a living being.

Sørøya/22

There are many hours before dawn, many hours of anxiety engross the sea body, and many hours of darkness plunge into the spaces of detachment.
The search for the outline of the body does not lead to the search for the outline of the memory of something that still has at least some familiar concrete narrative lines from life that did not happen.
On many days the stone holds the body, on many days the stone frees the memory.
The highest place in the cave is equal to my height (cut-off-160), and the lowest place allows a newborn to be placed in the architecture of this space. The water comes into contact with the stone every second, enters into touch with the body, and the body coalesces.

Sørøya/22

The place is known for its strong winds in all seasons, the wind presents very different sounds and resistances. The wind touches every surface of the landscape, forming a kind of distinct orchestral pit, where each element resounds through its own particular silence, together creating something that resonates through the body, my body.

This sound is entangled in the sound of one's own body, the feeling that breathing intensifies with the wind, the heartbeat obeys the wind’s vibrations, the body is no longer separate from the place; it becomes this place.

A group of people once became a collective breath of sorts for this place, leaving an invisible trace of presence in the cut of stones.

Sørøya/22

> FIELD NOTES

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