The Steilneset Memorial is a monument in

Vardø ( fi, Vuoreija, fkv, Vuorea, se, Várggát) is a municipality in Troms og Finnmark county in the extreme northeastern part of Norway. Vardø is the easternmost town in Norway, more to the east than Saint Petersburg or Istanbul. The administr ...

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the ...

, commemorating the trial and execution in 1621 of 91 people for

witchcraft Witchcraft traditionally means the use of magic or supernatural powers to harm others. A practitioner is a witch. In medieval and early modern Europe, where the term originated, accused witches were usually women who were believed to have ...

. The memorial was designed by artist

Louise Bourgeois Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (; 25 December 191131 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a varie ...

and architect

Peter Zumthor Peter Zumthor (; born 26 April 1943) is a Swiss architect whose work is frequently described as uncompromising and minimalist. Though managing a relatively small firm, he is the winner of the 2009 Pritzker Prize and 2013 RIBA Royal Gold Medal. E ...

and was opened in 2011. It was Bourgeois' last major work.

Background

In the seventeenth century, a series of

witch trial A witch-hunt, or a witch purge, is a search for people who have been labeled witches or a search for evidence of witchcraft. The classical period of witch-hunts in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America took place in the Early Modern perio ...

s occurred in Norway, of which the

Vardø witch trials ( fi, Vuoreija, fkv, Vuorea, se, Várggát) is a municipality in Troms og Finnmark county in the extreme northeastern part of Norway. Vardø is the easternmost town in Norway, more to the east than Saint Petersburg or Istanbul. The administr ...

were among the most substantial. Over a hundred people were tried for witchcraft, with 77 women and 14 men being

burned at the stake Death by burning (also known as immolation) is an execution and murder method involving combustion or exposure to extreme heat. It has a long history as a form of public capital punishment, and many societies have employed it as a punishment f ...

. The northern district of

Finnmark Finnmark (; se, Finnmárku ; fkv, Finmarku; fi, Ruija ; russian: Финнмарк) was a county in the northern part of Norway, and it is scheduled to become a county again in 2024. On 1 January 2020, Finnmark was merged with the neighbouri ...

, within which Vardø lies, experienced the highest rate of accusations of witchcraft of any part of Norway, and an unusually high proportion of executions arising from the trials. The trials peaked in 1662–1663; the memorial was built 348 years later.

Memorial

The Steilneset Memorial was jointly commissioned by the town of Vardø,

County, the Varanger Museum, and the

Norwegian Public Roads Administration The Norwegian Public Roads Administration ( no, Statens vegvesen) is a Norwegian government agency responsible for national and county public roads in Norway. This includes planning, construction and operation of the national and county road netw ...

, and has been associated with the development of the National Tourist Routes in Norway. Norwegian architects designed the public architecture associated with the routes, such as lookouts, under competitive tender, but the memorial was the result of a specific commission. A collaboration between French-American artist Louise Bourgeois and previous winner of the Pritzker Prize, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, design commenced in 2006, and the monument was opened by

Queen Sonja of Norway Sonja (born Sonja Haraldsen on 4 July 1937) is Queen of Norway since 17 January 1991 as the wife of King Harald V. Sonja and the then Crown Prince Harald had dated for nine years prior to their marriage in 1968. They had kept their relatio ...

on 23 June 2011. Bourgeois died in 2010, and her contribution to the project, titled ''The Damned, The Possessed and The Beloved'', was her last major installation. The Memorial comprises two separate buildings: a 410-foot-long wooden structure framing a fabric cocoon that contains Zumthor's installation; and a square smoked glass room, its roof 39 feet on each side, that contains the work of Bourgeois. Zumthor's structure is made from wooden frames, fabricated off-site and assembled to create sixty bays in a long line within which, suspended by cable-stays, is a coated fibreglass membrane that tapers at each end. Inside is a timber walkway, 328 feet long but just five feet wide, and along the narrow corridor are 91 randomly placed small windows representing those executed, each one accompanied by an explanatory text based on original sources. Through each window can be seen a single lightbulb, intended to evoke "the lamps in the small curtainless windows of the houses" of the region. The building that houses Bourgeois' installation stands in stark contrast to its companion. Its square structure is fabricated from

weathering steel Weathering steel, often referred to by the genericised trademark COR-TEN steel and sometimes written without the hyphen as corten steel, is a group of steel alloys which were developed to eliminate the need for painting, and form a stable r ...

and 17 panes of tinted glass, forming walls that stop short of the ceiling and floor. Inside, Bourgeois has set a metal chair with flames projecting through its seat. This is reflected "in seven oval mirrors placed on metal columns in a ring around the fiery seat, like judges circling the condemned." Writer Donna Wheeler, reflecting on Bourgeois' sculpture with its fire burning within the solitary chair, observed: "The perpetual flame – that old chestnut of commemoration and reflection – here is devoid of any redemptive quality, illuminating only its own destructive image".

References

External links

Arch daily article
on the Memorial, containing numerous images. {{coord, 70.3695, N, 31.0918, E, source:wikidata-and-enwiki-cat-tree_region:NO, display=title Monuments and memorials in Norway 2011 sculptures Works by Louise Bourgeois Vardø Witch trials in Norway