On this page, we kindly invite you to take an audiovisual journey through our notes and experiments from our field trips in Sørøya, Norway. Each experiment was a response to the state of the landscape at the time and the (im)possibility of finding the way to the caves.
This diary of sorts later shaped our method of creating an artistic archive of the memory of the Sørøya caves and our touch with this landscape and history of public space.
In meeting the place, one enters into delicate contact with culture and history as intimately as possible. But we were, and we remain, absolutely foreign bodies for this landscape.
Archival texts and historical memories contributed to a complex and slightly removed view of the caves. We knew that German troops knew of the existence of Kvithellhula, which is located near Hasvik, very close to the road, and is clearly visible from the sea. We had a certain idea about the landscape and about the interior of the cave itself, and the image was integral before the first encounter with the local winds and the sea.
There was no mention of the wind in the texts, although it is necessary to listen and observe its power constantly. Perhaps this is true if one is outside but not inside; maybe this is why the wind was silent in the texts.
In Hasvik, the wind determines everyday life. It determines movement and position. The wind can lock the body into a very confined space, strip it of visibility, envelop it in a dense, blinding white veil, hiding the landscape in the depth of its power. The wind can make the body sick.
One day, the wind blocked access to Sørøya while our bodies were on the island. We were immobilized, unable to see, unable to move. Sound has become our guide to the very depths of the Sørøya soil. Touch has become our vision, through delicate steps, touching the locality. The gaps between the slate surfaces, the air, and the snow created an audiovisual complexity of the landscape layers. These layers are intertwined through time, history, and locality, and we were in between them.
The first touch with the place occurred when we started fieldwork in the winter of 2022. Because of the brutal weather conditions on the island in winter, we decided to start by exploring the two caves that are most accessible in winter: Kvithellhula and Lillemolvika. We went to Sørøya in Hasvik Municipality in January to become immersed in Kvithellhula, where 35 people hid during the winter of 1944/45. The inhabitants of Sørøya left the surface of the earth and descended into its very depths. Among the stones, under metres of snow – their breath touched the rhythms around them.
The Sea. Its ebb and flow is not the main focus of memories from 1944/45, which once again brought us a sense of foreignness. The inhabitants of Sørøya know the rhythms of the place, they listen to the body, through the body; they grow up with the place. The sea, according to memories, made an eternal sound, artists later returned to this evinnelige lyden – this eternal sound – through linguistic immersion in 'sounding texts'. The eternal sound brought the inhabitants back to a religious sound, something that transcends sound as matter. It went beyond the body, beyond the sound. While the sea turned out to be the strongest resistance for us, it also soothed and lulled us. That sense created a special cradle inside the cave. Our own cradle is deep inside the soil.
Sørøya er...
‘An Indian name, born in someone’s imagination in New Zealand; the island in the very north includes the direction ‘south’ in its name. The only thing that’s clear is that this is an island, perhaps in the south.’ The borderline of unconsciousness where the fictional and the entity come across allows you to escape to some extent from the terrible events of mundanity, from those events that the land of the island of Sørøya preserves inside itself. It was important for us to hear the echoes of that very knowledge, that voice that, at a distance of seventy years or more and over many kilometers – from the north of the country to the south – transported us to some tableau narrative of a place born from the mouth of everyone we met. We spent May in Oslo listening carefully to what the people we asked knew of or guessed about the name Sørøya – literally ‘southern island’. The same land that gave us shelter when the war broke out in the winter of 2022 had shielded the island’s inhabitants from the Second World War in 1945 as they entered its hidden architecture.
The narrative emerging around the island now captures its dynamics and the absence of linearity, the archives with which we worked directly on site have passed into a kind of oral folklore, where information circulates from body to body and a rhythm is born that creates an image of a place that is no longer concealed, a place that forms new layers around itself, where, under the mass of voices, there is comfort to the place inside. Oral history is fluid, it envelops the sound that is born in the direct performative transfer of one line of narration to another. The listener's body seems to waltz between the spaces of figurative and structural superstructures of words, moving between places that predate our imagination, places where factual and fictional premises meet.
Choosing isolation, the inhabitants found themselves under many layers of earth, taking refuge in the silence of their land. Half of Sørøya’s population was positioned precariously in the region, life around them obscured as if shrouded. Being inside, isolated completely from a home that was no more. In a certain way, through a subtle rapprochement with a place familiar to the body, which is remembered by its outlines, touches, and sounds, this opened up the ability to feel this layered soil as the only thing still familiar to the body, the eye, the ear. The architecture of the soil becomes the interior for the body, the body that finds a position inside. Keep touching.
When we returned and then returned again, we unconsciously adapted this place, which had not invited us, for ourselves. Upon returning again, we consciously erased everything familiar to those whose interior is the house. This perceptional logic opened the nuances of what we had resisted so fervently when we came into touch with the caves. We changed our bodily behaviour in the caves. We stopped entering them in the way we usually enter our homes, we stopped perceiving the place as an interior, and we began to accept the place as a recess in the landscape. That very unfamiliar rationalism opened the way for us to return to ourselves as subjects, alien to this place and to ourselves, leaving a place for touch for its own awareness. The soil is our retreat, preserved in that very corridor of layered stones. Did the inhabitants of Sørøya remember that they were residents of the interiors of houses, did they remember that the architecture of the soil keeps the interior of the body in its layers? Have they become hostages of duality? Are we becoming hostages of dichotomy? War holds us in such a duality, and the outlines do not allow consciousness to return. Was there a way of releasing this duality, was there a touch with these layered stones, beyond those layers? Did we find a position between them? Through the darkness, immersed in that distant touch to the place, to get to the very place where the sounds were dulled and the body motionlessly resisted. Move in stillness, resist, and keep seeking touch. The body is wary of any immersion inside; bodily touch with the interior of the cave becomes deep, with the oppressive darkness of consciousness. Blurred darkness forms a place that is dangerous for the body, while acoustics whisper that you can keep moving. But if a place is filled with a body, how can you leave that place without a body?
The stone falls in line with the body.
Touching through the darkness with yourself, an inseparable draw arises to return to a place that is tactilely attractive, more reliable, more tolerant. Taking a small stone in my hands and slowly moving away from the familiar touch, a sound was born. The sound made such an enveloping reality there, in that very darkness. I wanted to stay in/with this sound, and at the same time I had a desire to destroy it with something more foreign, something noisy and sharp. Knocking the surface more strongly seemed to intensify the distance from the place. Why did one have to touch and seek coalescence, if the desire was to break it all the time? That coalescence was lost in the depths of these thundering layers of darkness. At a certain point I was losing the borders of my own body in the movement through/inside that darkness. What was inside? Moving further and further away through the consonance of two stones, and the body turns out to be only an intermediary in these relationships. There is a stop inside, and having heard it, the body can sense that there is only one safe scenario: not to leave this state. Leaving this sound through your own darkness, where the position of the body is now without boundaries.
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
bodybody
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
body
It is worth mentioning that our field trips were made when the polar night was already coming to an end. This simplified movement for us, and it also made for a very strong contrast between the darkness inside and the blocking, blinding white snow zone outside
Since Hasvik, like many other areas in northern Norway, was rebuilt after World War II, the landscape retained only the memory of the houses, the knowledge of which went deep into the soil. People continued to live and observe certain social rituals, changing their paradigm of being inside the new interior of the caves. We wondered how this transition from the private space of the home to the public space takes place, how the space of the cave becomes a public space, preserving the very private safe space of the former homes. Can we return to the archive and memory of the public space of the cave by returning to the memory space of the houses? The working title of this public space is The Room, during the 3 months from November to January one of the rooms in the Hasvik house will be reconstructed through acoustic transformation, opening us a place to share information about the public landscape that people once transformed. During these three months, anyone can stay in this Room and spend some time in it with the possibility of its transformation and the possibility of finding a way to adapt to the new sound conditions of the room's everyday space. In addition, the Room suggests finding the boundaries of public and personal memory space through one's own body and trying to separate oneself from places that already have a deep collective memory and body behavior in places such as the voids of Sørøya.
Listening and obeying opened up the possibility for us to immerse ourselves through our own bodies, creating that very echo inside the landscape. An echo that resonates across distances. Memories were intertwined with physical experience, an experience that allowed simply being. Our material is stored in our touches, our narrative resonates through every step, and our traces remain in the locality, gently erasing them from the surface. We coexist with the island, listening to the soil, and we become temporary residents of the place that is inside.
In Between. The body has been in incubation for 52 days. The latent period has firmly consolidated its positions and coalesced with the incubation period. The resistance that occurs in this vacuum is aligned with the sensation of the body, which cannot find its position in this gap. A time that still resembles this rhythmic cut-off in the day, at the moment when the day lost its boundaries. These rhythms of resistance construct a place that is firmly fixed in the body, where the body increasingly feels the loss of its outline. The surrounding space is so isolated that external vibrations do not reflect the sound inside or allow the body to remember what it could remember outside the place where the resistance is the environment. Time which should not be – a sound that is not born.
The surface of the soil we touch grows flatter. The correspondence has a soft rhythm, and in our walking the body gradually dissolves. The environment ceases to be occupied, and the space in which we found ourselves opens up; there are several paths that seem to lead to a place with a niche for a long sojourn. A concave space in which the body finds silence and stillness. A nook tucked in the very depths of the corridor of layered stones. Through many levels of these stones, we slowly sink into a place that is so easy to go through. The place is inside the bend of those rhythmic and multi-layered stones. The softness of this place creates a false sense of calmness. It envelops the body, it extends an invitation into itself. Duality arises at the moment of touch when you are inside the cave, it repels; it does not allow you to find a niche for the body, it does not welcome or keep you inside. Openness destroys that sacredness; the body does not find silence within. The softness of this place falsely creates a sense of tranquillity and enswathes the body through rejection.
This workshop is about touching memory through the experience of body resistance/conflux-of-voice. In seeking to understand the nature of the sound[ing] described by one of the cave dwellers, Nataliia formulated the question of translating that sound into a vocal and bodily experience as such. Theodor Barth suggested to Nataliia that the word "evinnelige/evindelig" mentioned in the description of the sound could, among other things, be translated as [nagging].
Then, without a time limit, but by defining time with a pattern, we tried to create such a deconstructive space within the body, where the voice itself is part of the archive. Excerpts from the workshop:
Chants 1-4
Voice no.1 - Sai Alon
The output of this workshop includes the creation of a sound algorithm using 35 voices.
You can compose your own vocal composition/ensemble by [dag etter dag], turning on all the voices at the same time or combining them one by one, choosing [dag] from one chant and [etter] from another and etc.
Your own body becomes the instrument for ambient sound. Reflecting this sound, forming a distance between the sound streams that circulate in the environment, the sound freezes inside the body, going into the very depths of the soil with which we come into contact again and again. The soil retains all those sound vibrations, just as we keep all those sounds of the voices of the inhabitants that become our own, inseparable from the landscape and overlapping in time. The sound forms an infinite interval that materializes through the layering of the soil and us in it.
