Utøya

Werner Zellien, who turned his camera towards individuals in his early photographic works, later moved away from the human figure, realising that he was “more interested in taking pictures of beings that are no longer here”. From then on, his photographs began to track absence, disappearance or loss through traces left such as, for instance, the footprints of an animal or a human being.

Werner Zellien’s "Utøya" consists of 45 images produced in remembrance of the mass-killing perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik on the Utøya island (Norway), on 22 July 2011. 69 people from the Workers’ Youth League (AUF), the youth wing of the Norwegian Labour Party, lost their lives and 110 were injured in this massacre, which went down in history as one of the most violent mass shootings perpetrated by a single gunman in the 21st century. Zellien contacted the Workers’ Youth League a few months after the killing, expressing his willingness to produce a photographic work with the objective of preserving that which is going to disappear. In pursuit of lives gone, he was allowed to go onto the abandoned island at the darkest time of the year, when the sun only rises at around 10 am. Alone on the island covered with a thin layer of snow, Zellien photographed, from 7 am until noon, every place where the victims of the killing were shot and left dead by the perpetrator.

Conceived by the artist as “a pendulum of grief and mourning”, the series begins in pitch-black darkness and ends with the sun just above the horizon; however, one can look at the photographs in both directions, from darkness to brightness and back to darkness. The following excerpt from a poem by Friedrich Rückert accompanies the 44 photographs:

Now the sun prepares to rise as brightly,
As though no misfortune had befallen in the night.
The misfortune befell me alone,
The sun, it shines on all mankind

(Translated by Richard Stokes)

Rückert (1788–1866), who was a poet, translator and professor of oriental languages, mastering 30 languages, stands as a representative of multiculturality, in opposition to the perpetrator’s extremist, white-supremacist ideas. In 1834, he wrote 428 poems gathered under the title "Kindertotenlieder" [Songs on the Death of Children] to grieve the death of two of his children who had died of scarlet fever.

Articulating darkness and light, despair and hope, "Utøya" restores the massacre, at the same time paying homage to those who lost their lives, and also to the island: keeper of the few traces left that bear witness to the massacre. Questioning what place this tragedy occupies in individual and social memory, the work stands as an attempt to lament and mourn all acts of destruction and violence inflicted by human beings.