70°35′N 22°44′E
TOUCHING VOIDS INSIDE THE SØRØYA
The path to Kvithellhula
The embodiment of our steps in the landscape
LANDSCAPE
A place where the landscape became the architecture, and the hidden public space such as the cave became the interior. Where the memory is preserved inside the soil, and we can get in touch with history through our bodies. A place where the smooth transition in a rough environment takes place and the landscape is becoming the cavescape, the cavescape is becoming the humanscape, the humanscape is becoming the landscape. A place where the collective memory in public space is seen as body memory which must be experienced individually in order to be preserved.
The first touch with the place occurred in the winter of 2022 when Nina and Nataliia started fieldwork on the DUNKE-DUNK. Taking into account the brutal weather conditions on the island during the winter months, the artists decided to start their exploration with the 3 caves that are as accessible as possible during winter: Kvithellhula, Sandfjordhula, Lillemolvika.
In January, the artists went to the island of Sørøya, Hasvik municipality to immerse themself into one of the caves - Kvithellhula, where 35 people hid during the winter of 1944/45, a place that became home to the inhabitants of Sørøya. Having left the surface of the soil, they found themselves in the very depths of it.
Among the stones, under meters of snow - the breaths touched the rhythms around.
Hasvik mothballed the rather long history of the place, which keeps the architectural features of different generations of residents between its stones. There is an assumption that traces of Stone Age settlements are still kept inside the soil layers. The municipality keeps this history in its commune archives as one of the scripts of the DNA of its land. Through their borders, one can find some imprints in the landscape, in the form of indentations in the ground, or rather the remains of ancient settlements - preserving the memory of the dynamics of Hasvik as a public place, whose architecture is an integral part of the stone landscape. Water level changes also reveal previously hidden layers. The lines of the hidden cities change from century to century, and events from the outside return the inhabitant of the houses to the form of existence inside the stone, inside the soil. Like this knowledge of the place, this memory allows us to rethink the memory of the place, one that in a sense is a living archive of a stone metropolis. Where the inhabitants are constantly moving from level to level in places that are hidden inside the stone by thousands of years of human history.
Second World War
In the winter during the Second World War, for three months at different periods, the inhabitants of the Sørøya island, who refused to evacuate, hid in the caves of their region. While the Germans were burning their land.
OUR FIELD
DIARY
In-Between. 52 days since the body is in the incubation period. The latent period has firmly consolidated its positions and is firmly coalesced with the incubation period. The resistance that occurs in this vacuum space is in tune with what the body feels, which cannot find its position in this gap.
A time that still resembles this rhythmic cutoff in the day, at the moment when the day lost its boundaries. These rhythms of resistance build a place that is firmly fixed in the body, where the body increasingly feels the loss of its outline. The space around is so isolated that any external vibration does not reflect the sound inside, does not 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.
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The surface of the soil we touch becomes flatter. The correspondence is in a soft rhythm, and the body gradually dissolves in our walking. The environment ceases to be occupied, and the space in which we found ourselves opens up several paths that seem to lead to a place in which there is a nook for a long stop. A concave in which the body finds silence and stillness. A nook that is stored 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 very layered rhythmic stones.
The softness of this place falsely creates a sense of calmness. Envelops the body and invites to itself. Duality arises at the moment of touch when you are inside the cave, it repels and does not allow you to find a nook for the body, does not invite 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 tranquility and enswathes the body through rejection.
When we returned and then again returned, we unconsciously adapted the place for us, the very place that did not invite us. Having returned again, we consciously erased everything that is so familiar to the person whose interior is the house. The logic of perception opened to us the nuances of what we resisted so much when we came into touch with the caves.
We changed our bodily behavior in the cave, we stopped going there as we usually go into 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 a subject, alien to this place as same as to ourselves. Leaving a place for touch for its own awareness.
The soil is our nook, the one that is kept in that very corridor of layered stones. Did 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?
The war holds us inside in this duality, in which the outlines around did not allow consciousness to return back. Was there a way of releasing this duality, was there touch with these layered stones, beyond those layers? Did we find a position between them? Through the darkness, immersed to 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 looking for touch. The body is wary of any immersion inside since bodily touch with the interior of the cave becomes a deep bodily touch with the oppressive darkness of consciousness. Blurred darkness forms a place dangerous for the body, while acoustics whispers that you can keep moving. But if a place is filled with a body, how can you leave that place without a body?
