When the Landscape is Becoming

The voids of the Sørøya region have gone through several stages of landscape transformation from spaces existing in themselves to public spaces, whose significance has transformed the memory dynamics of the landscape in the question of social memory and forgetting. The landscape has adopted the body as part of a social form of integration of natural and architectural spaces, through a behavioral form, the body coexists in places that are intended for the existence of the incorporeal and spatial. The landscape of memory did not leave traces of this stay but left in itself the knowledge of it.

The memory of the landscape neatly holds all those many touches of humanity and history, preserves forgotten narratives and peacefully exists in its own distinctive form of preservation and internal cultivation of memory by itself, non-subjectively. The memory of the Sørøya landscape maintains invisible traces of collective touches with the internal interiors of the soil, and has keeping knowledge about a public place, which has a distant echo in the diaries of the region. During our field trips some reminiscence of these texts were retold by island residents, resonated in past but at the same time were absent in their form of knowledge in museums and the memory of residents outside the public landscape of the caves of the region. Meanwhile, events were reconstructed in conjunction with the historical context, reconstructed through an attempt to find at least some visual traces of the being of people in these caves by archaeologists. But the more time passes, the deeper the memory of these places closes its spaces as evidence of its internal publicity.

Some data (Huleboere på Sørøya fra Hasvik kommune) that shows us the names of families who lived in the voids of caves for a certain period of time, helps us to gain knowledge that is similar to a population census. In a sense it draws an idea in the context of the social landscape.

That landscape that was not defined as a public place inside the caves but became a space of social transformation of the landscape into this particular form of settlement during the evacuation, which changed the knowledge of the cave, as about the knowledge of the memory of the public space.

The transformation of the landscape into the public space also took place through everyday rituals revealed at the time the inhabitants of Sørøya living in the voids of the landscape. By singing Christmas songs or cooking flatbread from flour as the way of transitivity of landscape to the social phenomenon, in addition, that draws attention to the process of memory through the process of making everyday experience of landscape as a partnership with it itself—thus defining the increasing continuity of human and landscapes in the co-habitation and transformation of each other. In the same way, this reflects an echo of the very repetition to which contemporary archaeologists are increasingly returning as repetitive, habitual activities, passing the rules of social life (more Van Duke “practice, intentionality, senses’), following and increasing attention to behavioral features in the relation of physical evidence. The behavior leads us to construct to cohabitate together and shape communities beyond generations (discursive and practical memory). The issue of such relations remains the same question of the materialization of the evidence of these relations if this partnership is not a product of resource and labor dialogues, but is a spiritual and spatial relationship. Will such relationships be reflected or exist in artistic knowledge, and how will this knowledge cohabitate in social memory? If materials not only persist but also decay and accumulated then how maintain this balance in landscape memory observation take a place? Should we reconsider the terminology of 'materialized memory' to 'matterialized memory' and refer to artistic methods as a form of constructing remembering while forgetting?

Inscape

The memory of the Sørøya landscape also draws attention to the phenomenon of ‘inscape’. Indeed the inhabitants have chosen the path of not being evacuated to safe areas, and indeed the inhabitants have defined their landscape as a place for inscape. ‘In' ‘Scape’ itself is an extremely complex body in terms of Sørøya voids, where this transition from landscape = to Inscape - in cavescape takes place. Social memory of the landscape as a consequence of the collective transformation of nature. The public space within the landscape of Sørøya was formed through the collective transition of the local residents of the houses into those who organized the space of the house around them, moving into the bowels of the stones and thereby transforming the visual representation of how the collective body exists in the landscape, how the landscape is transformed not through the external change of nature but through human behavior and how is those human behavior being forgotten in a presence of social memory. The Sørøya caves sing about the past through the present. We could follow how the social memory draws a line through the dynamics of the landscape and habitual social and cultural practices to our nature. The landscape is moving into materialization as evidence that the memory of public places can take the form of "experience and sense of the body and behaviour as such”. The memory of the landscape contains traces that are often elusive or have largely lost their visual images.

The landscape often hides in itself the memory of human behaviour as such, through forms of collective intervention and the form of human activity. The landscape in the practices of social phenomena is quite complex, on the one hand, it is always a product of our activity through a resource or land cultivation, on the other hand, the landscape exists by itself as a raw wildland and un-subject space.

We are The Ingredient

Our body scale is a reflection of our environmental perception as man is aware of the surroundings behind his/her head as in front. Koffka once mentioned ‘What is it that lies between the ‘in front’ and the ‘behind’? - ‘Just that phenomenal object we call the Ego’. Hasvik is a public place that is on the surface exactly like the public place that is hidden inside, right under our feet. The hidden place whose architecture is reflected in the archives sounds in the memories passing from one resident to another, from local to the outlander, from body to body, from soil to soil. The hidden public place whose image is preserved by recesses in the landscape, reserving the right to be wrapped in a multitude of images of memory and imagination. The place that is built through memories, their absence, through awareness of one's own body as an observer of it - all this builds a kind of visual architecture of the memory of a hidden place inside the landscape. So What is it that lies between the ‘up’ and ‘down’ then? Perhaps such a phenomenal object we call The Memory. The public place of the cave, allows us to become an observer of places that hide in the surfaces through touch and determination of our own position, up or down. Through the definition of one's own position scale, there is a touching of the place, what is visually accessible, and what is hidden under the surface above the Hasvik. The optics of the ecological approach suggests shifting the paradigm of one's own body in relation to the local landscape. If we consider a hidden public space from the perspective of a cave, where the body is in some way an observer, a certain architecture of the body arises, which no longer uses the cave as a shelter, but becomes one of the compositions of its layers, something that acquires the material of time. The awareness of the environment is the awareness of the memory collected by all those hidden voids of the Hasvik landscape, where a man as a resident becomes a common ingredient for the memory of the line of the region under the soil. Where the smooth transition takes place, the landscape is becoming the cavescape, the cavescape is becoming the humanscape, the humanscape is becoming the landscape.