In Norway, in the city of Vardø, the construction of a monument to the victims of the "witch hunt" is nearing completion. Its authors are the architect Peter Zumthor and the artist Louise Bourgeois. The bourgeois will not see the memorial in Vardø, her last work, completed: she passed away in May of this year.
Vardø is located in the north of Norway, near the Russian border, and occupies half of a small island separated from the mainland by a narrow strait. This area is called Finnmark, its indigenous population is akin to the Finns, the Lapps. Another name for the area - Varanger - apparently appeared thanks to Russian sailors who called the Norwegians in a medieval way "Varangians". Vardø is the northernmost city in Norway, from which Amundsen's polar expeditions started. Since the late 1990s, the island has been crowned with a monumental sphere of US military radar, supposedly for observing space; at its foot are the remains of an old fortress, a wooden town of several streets and a high, also wooden, church.
Vardø is known as one of the largest witch-hunting centers in Europe. In Norway in the 17th century, the central government had little control over the provinces, where officials, often foreigners, ruled arbitrarily. Many Lapps at that time were pagans, practicing witchcraft. In addition, in fishing villages, men went to sea for a long time. Officials doubted the abstinence of their wives and suspected that, due to the lack of men, they entered into contact with evil spirits. According to the historian Rune Blix Hagen of the University of Tromsø in his publications, in one century - from 1593 to 1692 - about 140 trials of witches took place in Vardø, and about 100 people were sentenced to death and burned. The courts were not ecclesiastical, but civil. Contrary to stereotypes, the courts often passed acquittals, there were many men among the defendants, most of the convicts were Norwegians, not Lapps (in particular, all the executed women were Norwegians).
Centuries later, before the onset of the third millennium, the authorities of the Norwegian provinces began to invent memorial projects associated with the most significant moments in their history. The Finnmark government decided to build a Pomor Museum in Vardø (the city actively traded with the Pomors for a long time) and a monument to the victims of the Witchcraft trials. They had to be carried out within a five-year period, until 2005. The museum - a branch of the local Varanger Museum - was built, but the memorial did not work out.
Then the organization "National Tourist Routes" (Nasjonale turistveger) became interested in the project. Having started functioning in 2005, it started to create a new system of tourist routes, and as infrastructure facilities (observation platforms, bridges, parking lots), it built many beautiful architectural structures, which themselves have become new attractions in Norway. "National Tourist Routes" became the customer and the monument in Vardø. At the same time, according to Reidun Laura Andresson, Special Adviser to the People's Commune of Finnmark, the Varangian Museum will organize exhibitions related to the memorial and excursions to it.
A new working group was created under the leadership of the painter Svein Rønning, which included, in particular, the sculptor Knut Wold. The group critically assessed the idea of the memorial, which was going to be carried out by the city authorities and the administration of the museum. According to Rönning, “The plan for the memorial was more religious at the time, [being] a monument to all religions. We decided that we should change it, make it an art installation and part of the National Tourist Routes project. " Their first thought was about the famous artist Louise Bourgeois, the second - about the architect Peter Zumthor. “We sent a letter to Louise Bourgeois with information about the place and about the local witchcraft processes. We didn't know how these strong personalities would react to the idea of working together. However, they both agreed."
Louise Bourgeois wrote letters to customers in which she was primarily interested in the fate of the convicted witches: were they strong, were they sexually active, etc. Then there was a long exchange of emails between the artist and the architect (“you start first” - “no, you”), Then finally, in the fall of 2006, they made the first sketches. Zumthor began designing the memorial after visiting Vardø. The site for the memorial had already been determined - the very place where the executions took place. However, Zumthor himself chose the specific points in which two of his buildings will be located.
The monument consists of a long wooden gallery with windows, the number of which corresponds to the number of those executed on this site, and a free-standing cubic pavilion made of black glass. The pavilion houses an installation by Louise Bourgeois - a chair with tongues of flame escaping from it and seven oval mirrors above it. As Per Ritzler of National Tourist Routes explains, “The bourgeois was referring to women and their social environment. They were mothers, wives, and a chair with five flames should symbolize their family members. Mirrors symbolize witnesses to their brutal murder."
Louise Bourgeois managed not only to develop the installation, which was built in strict accordance with her detailed project, but also to see and approve the project of the architectural envelope of her structure.
The memorial was planned to be built in 2009. However, in the summer of that year, its construction was frozen due to lack of funding. In the fall, funds were found, construction resumed, and in July 2011 it is planned to complete it completely.
According to Ms. Andreessen, local residents have an ambiguous attitude towards the monument. Many (indeed, many) are happy with him, others see him as an unreasonable waste of money. One of the project's supporters, Håvard S. Mækelæ, editor-in-chief of the local independent newspaper Osthavet, notes that almost all the money spent on the construction of the memorial has come from outside the city. In addition, he said, "There are many small monuments in Vardø, so there have been comments about the island being turned into a museum." However, these are the voices of skeptics, not of principled opponents of the memorial. Many doubters were tempted by the fact that the city would be home to an expensive object of famous authors. Everyone hopes that the monument will attract tourists to the city, who, according to Mekele, "are becoming more and more important in the economy of Vardø."
