A truly significant event arrests the normal passage of time, cutting and dividing the continuum of history into before and after , while announcing itself as a central, eternalised present . We are either participants who suffer the full weight of its force, or observers hit by physical and psychic reverberations emitted by the shock of its arrival. Every significant event requires us to come to terms with its aftermath, sometimes in the form of a memorial space in which the full experience of the event can be explored, considered and mourned. In this memorial, incomprehensible chaos at the epicentre of a tragic even is, through distance, resolved into a continuous narrative that allows some sense to be made of the event.
monument, located on the shoreline — the liminal space between nature and humanity wherever water meets land. The waves of the Lysakerfjorden lapping at the slate slabs metonymically repeat the original tsunami in miniature. The slabs appear to shoot away from the epicentre, leaving an absence at the heart of the monument that signifies the unimaginable and uncontainable nature of the disaster. The second viewing point is located well away from the first; moving away on a pathway that runs along the Lysakerfjorden shore. This path is bordered by the same granite used in the twenty-five stone slates, and culminates in an echo point: a location of significant distance from the
epicentre to offer a perspective on the traumatic event in its entirety. The seeming chaos at the impact point has visually resolved itself as two large walls, stretching seamlessly across the horizon like the continuum of history broken only by the absent centre of the event itself. The scale of our monument is meant to shock the visitor into reconsideration of the explosive nature of trauma, while the intimacy of the surroundings imply that an experience need not be global in scale to be traumatic, and that perhaps in engaging with traumas of epic proportions we can learn to recognise and consider the traumas of the everyday. D
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