falstad workshop book — 43
When we started our work on the project we had two basic questions. The first was the background question of the whole Recall workshop: Is there a way to deal with difficult heritage beside making a memorial out of it? A lot of follow up questions to that popped up: Dealing with difficult heritage and heritage in general is remembering and commemorating. It is about what is remembered and what has to be remembered. The question is, who does remember? Remembering in psychological and sociological terms always is a process and always results in something. This fact is what is usually used in making a memorial function, the production of a social consensus regarding events in the past. In a place like Falstad, a short 10 Min walk from the Fjord and in the Trondelag region, a popular place for tourists in the summer, does a reaction to the past develop without a distinctive routing? In our concept we tried to have a collection of historical details which is as undefined as possible. The viewer should not be guided, but should discover. We don’t want a valuation of details with which always comes a valuation of historic periods. For an archaeologist a sword is a sword and pottery is pottery. A sword is not an enabler of suffering or giver of peace but a sword. We don’t want to establish the one possible reading of history, which always also means a blurring of other histories. That is the reason for our de-constructivist approach. Tear down the walls, create new ones. Shut out the blur of 1990s artefacts, only keep a profile of all layers of time. And that is the case with the two most important single structures in the space, the fireplaces and the kitchen, prime examples of their respective layers of time, the 1940s and the 1990s.