Bjørnar Olsen & Þóra Pétursdóttir (2014) Sarnes Internat: Archaeological aesthetics (Photo essay). Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1(1).

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Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1.1 (2014) 57–72ISSN (print) 2051-3429 (online) 2051-3437 DOI:10.1558/jca.v1i1.57

57

PHOTO ESSAY

Sarnes Internat: Archaeological Aesthetics

nBjørnar OlsenUiT The Arctic University of [email protected]

nÞóra PétursdóttirUiT The Arctic University of [email protected]

If you travel the E69 highway to North Cape, one of Norway’s most famous tourist attractions, you will a short hour before you reach your high north destination pass by the quiet and picturesque fishing village of Sarnes. And despite the affluence of stunning views your eyes will almost certainly be drawn towards a large concrete building resting in a conspicuous state of decay at the roadside. With the roof partly blown off, fading yellow paint, withering concrete, and curtains fluttering through gaping windows, the derelict building seems utterly misplaced in this remote northern landscape.

The building originally housed a boarding school—internat school—and is still today only known as Sarnes Internat. When inaugurated in 1958 the official name given to it, however, was Solvang Internatskole. Solvang means something like “sunny meadow,” a common national-romantic toponym in Norway, which alludes to other and far-away southern places. And thus also to the less explicitly expressed “mission” of the state boarding schools in this ethnically mixed northern region: To strengthen Norwegian national identity and to integrate or assimilate the Sámi and Kven minorities not sharing it.

For twenty-three years Sarnes Internat served as school and home for children arriv-ing from small farms and hamlets scattered throughout a vast coastal district. Without any road connection to the outside world, the children were transported by boat to the boarding school, where they shared dormitories, classrooms, refectories, bathrooms and playgrounds. Many of their superiors—the housemother, teachers and assistants—also

Keywords: Sarnes, gathering past, abandonment, ruination, things, photography, material memory

[email protected]

[email protected]

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58 Photo Essay

lived here most of the time. Having to leave your home at the age of 7, it was indeed a new world to be learned and coped with at Sarnes Internat.

In 1971 the boarding school was closed down, but for a period the building continued to be used as school for the few children living in the Sarnes village. Attempts were also made to turn the building into a guesthouse or motel, but despite added facilities, such as a bar and café, they were largely unsuccessful. During a brief period it also accommodated workers constructing the tunnel and road that connected Sarnes to the national road system in 1999. Since the early 2000s the building has been abandoned and left more or less to its own destiny.

In this brief history of the building events unfold in succession, as a series of replace-ments, where the “before” and “after” take place in their proper chronological order, as also expected in the conventional biography—whether of people, things or buildings. In the material past that welcomes you at Sarnes Internat, however, this order is utterly disrupted and defied. Times are compressed and assembled, made durable and co-present. And in this slow and lingering past, events have continued to merge and pile also after any official search for new possibilities and formal uses came to an end. Despite the years of abandonment and ruination human and non-human visitors alike have continued to leave their traces, contributing to an ever more mixed and gathering past.

While becoming increasingly more vulnerable to the threat of demolition and removal, and thus, quite literally, of becoming “history”—Sarnes Internat has so far survived all petitions and pleas for its disposal. Stubbornly continuing to display its ruining face at the roadside, it has also started to attract new attention and interest, redeeming an unforeseen trade-off value as ruin, and fostering various alternative uses. Last summer the school’s windows were boarded up to accommodate the need of a new feature movie, “Yearning for Today,” shot in the building, adding yet another layer to its already rich and flattened past.

In its ruining state Sarnes Internat thus objects to a simplified notion of abandon-ment as an end to a building or site, a death of something once warm and full of life. As human control and care has ceased, the building takes on a new mode of being. It starts to accommodate to its own pace and rhythms and to engage in new ways with humans, things and natures. The diversity and unpredictable nature of these engage-ments has been made manifest to us through repeated encounters with Sarnes over the last few years: People stop by for memories, for thrill, curiosity and ghosts, or they are simply drawn by the building’s pure ruin allure. Animals, birds, may have more pragmatic relations to the ruining structure, finding shelter and home in its increasingly more accessible facilities. And as the building ages and withers, also other agents of nature intrude. Weather and seasonal changes become part of its formerly secluded spaces, part of its vernacular ecology. Plants and funguses grow in cracks in walls and along the floors; snow drifts in and creates new surfaces, new seasonal layers that both conceal and expose the forms of things.

Through all these new engagements the Sarnes assemblage is constantly altered. New materials are introduced; suspicious pebbles on the floor inside broken windows, graffiti on walls, palimpsestal messages on chalkboards, deserted nests, animal droppings, icicles and snowdrifts. But native things are also moving, being moved and removed

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59Archaeological Aesthetics

from their former locations, resulting in subtle or distinct alterations and absences; classrooms left with a single table and chair, the solitary imprint of a removed wall chest, the void of the gramophone and perambulator encountered last time.

Within these changing and hybrid assemblages there is evidently a certain material precedence, an “effective archaeology,” which cares for and foregrounds the boarding school past. This formative past stands out in the very building itself, the grand entrance and the interiors, of course, but is also conspicuously present in myriads of stranded things; a past ruined and petrified at the same time. And yet, despite the material prevalence of the boarding school past, itself already piled and compressed, it is always merged with succeeding pasts and futures. For this very reason the experience of this past cannot be isolated from the material enmeshment that also affects the visitor or archaeologist upon encounter. Even if intending to study or grasp a specific historical past, the boarding school years, to approach the place and entering the building involves, intentionally or not, the sacrifice of any such ambitions of intellectual precedence and controlled observation.

The very building itself, the stark ruining façade, the rooms and corridors, and the excess of redundant and broken things, require and demand your full sensual presence, an attentive engagement. They address you not theoretically or abstractly but through a corporal immediacy that defies attempts at contemplative and cognitive distancing. Such anaesthetization and distancing can and—to some extent inevitably—will take place in subsequent phases of analysis. However, insofar as one does not see these “affects and aversions” as disturbances or threats to scholarly conducts but as significant and integral also to the derived constitution of meaning, then we should opt for ways to also seize and hold on to these initial moments of encounter—and photography makes one such unique means.

The camera is an instant device that can be used without formulating words or thoughts; the shutter is activated as a response to what you see and feel, a way to immediately interact with it. Describing the encounter in a notebook, or using a voice recorder—means of documentations which in no way should be dismissed—involves a thoughtful verbalizing that is different from the instantness of photography. What is mentioned and described in words is always (or mostly) intentionally formulated and included. While photography also is selective, its “openness” and inclusiveness care not only for perspectives selected but also for those presences not immediately noticed—and thus allows for their later “rediscovery.” And though there are post phases of critical assessment, such as which photos to choose for a photo essay in a distant scholarly journal, something of this affordance and excess is still maintained—and held in reserve—also in those photographs privileged and which therefore may bring new and unforeseen memories to their future encounters.

Photographs from Sarnes Internat encompass such inclusiveness and “complete-ness.” The multitude of things and details present in the school building and their close and often not fully compatible entanglement make it impossible, through a non-intrusive approach, to select or capture only certain perspectives or objects. Things cram in, invade the frame, and details never noticed—never thought of—are equally there and thus mediated. This tenacious affordance of things—and of the photographs—also

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defies adherence to any chronological preferences beforehand imagined. The moments “frozen” in the photographs do not belong to any instant and cleansed “then” but to a multitemporal now that objects to such chronological slicing. That is, though the effec-tive archaeology of the boarding school—present in desks, chairs and stray things, in classrooms and corridors, in the dormitory and refectory—cannot be evaded, it can neither be divorced from the way in which its durable and effective presence has also accommodated its own future.

The direction of the lens will of course select and exclude but the inclusiveness of the photograph also facilitates remembrance of what things hold back, their other face, as well as those things hidden behind, underneath or lurking in dim corners. Thus, while the photographs from Sarnes of course remember what has been—the school’s inhabited past—they also recall these things, now, their integrity and how they withdrew from our view. In that sense, the “completeness” of the images recalls the incompleteness of our perspective. Things were everywhere, also where we didn’t look or could not see; like under the snow cover. The Sarnes images thus remember—indeed, in a positive way—the very fragmented nature and tangible qualities of material memory. Unlike the derived histories and interpretations we often seek to formulate these are immediate, non-linear, piecemeal, particular, and even banal or naïve. Though some of them undoubtedly may be analyzed, narrated, “tamed,” and thus made productively and coherently meaningful beyond the level of affective immediacy, the power that springs from the mere surface of things encountered is what these photographs will always and effortlessly hold on to. And it is this bluntness that also recalls the primitive and sometimes childish curiosity that led us through the boarding school wonders.

As such the Sarnes photographs also bring forth the aesthetics of fieldwork and the affects and wonders of thingly encounters mostly excluded from conventional archaeological narrations. The color, smell and touch of things; the brightness of low sunlight on fading wallpaint, the long shadows of things inside uncovered windows, the tentative touch of an unknown object. They help you recall the coldness of concrete and the warm dampness of your breath; and how the sound of dry snow drifting and dripping water accentuate rather than disturb the saturated silence in an abandoned building. The bluntness and adhesiveness of the images thereby invite us to include all these unarticulated and ineffable sensations of things preceding explanation, and which accordingly have mostly gone unseen in an academic regime where aesthetic experiencing is rendered suspicious and even fetishistic. And for the very same reason these qualities have indeed also been framed as negative and harmful by those who speak against the photographs’ claimed “dangerous” aestheticizing.

Rather than bringing forth a distortion, a biased image—or narrative—of the boarding school past or present, we feel the photographs bring us closer to Sarnes and its things. And far from leaving out or distorting the human dimension, this material aesthetics also allows us some physical sympathy with and thus recollection of the conditions of those who once spent their childhood on these premises. A naked basement shower, stairs and corridors, resting toys, collapsed wall bars, notebooks and unfinished home-works; the rich deposits of redundant things that trigger a wealth of involuntary material memories—of childhood and play, discipline and work, home-longing and dreams. And

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in some sense, the affective presence of these things, and the boarding school past, is perhaps made even stronger, or more actual and abrupt, when addressing us—also in the photographs—from their now oddly gathered and juxtaposed position—among bar chairs, workmen’s clothes and wellies, graffiti, snow dunes, and nestling birds.

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Bjørnar Olsen & Þóra Pétursdóttir (2014) Sarnes Internat: Archaeological aesthetics (Photo essay). Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1(1).

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