Vigeland Park - Oslo, Norway; human nature in 212 sculptures || #club5050

My journey today will not only be about space but also about time. We will go back to 2010, when I spontaneously bought cheap flights to Norway (it was the only cheap thing on that trip), hoping to spend Christmas and New Year in Oslo. Since the photos are over a decade old, the quality is not perfect and, unfortunately, they all have a date tag at the bottom. However, I hope that you will turn a blind eye to this detail and spend a pleasant time with me visiting one of the biggest attractions in Oslo - Vigeland Park.

Vigeland Park is a free attraction, which for me, a student going on a trip to Norway - one of the most expensive countries in the world, was quite important. I will not even mention how for the whole week I ate only at McDonald's to save some money. I will skip mentioning how I wanted to save so I stayed last night at the airport which, after my arrival, turned out not to be open 24 hours a day (December, Scandinavia, snow, @papi.mati huddled at the door of a closed airport:P) … such charms of traveling as a young student.

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Okay, I'm starting to write offtopic when I should be focusing on the merits. Oslo offers plenty of free and interesting attractions: the Nobel Peace Prize Museum, the National Opera House (a beautiful, modernist building), the City Hall (with a tour inside), parks, and the beautiful coastline. Of all, the most interesting, however, is the one I decided to share with you today: Vigeland Park

The history of its creation is as interesting as all two hundred (or even more) sculptures in the park. Initially, Mr. Vigeland, a local artist, and sculptor to whom the park owes its unofficial name (the official one is the Vigeland Sculpture Collection in Frogner Park) were commissioned to create a fountain for the city hall. The boy, however, had a vivid imagination and began to sketch sculptures around the future fountain, then he added new ones, took into account the bridges connecting the individual elements, and before he realized that he should stop, he already had 320,000 m2 of plans.

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When the artist was given the green light to implement his ambitious plan, he enlisted the help of dozens of other sculptors, who created for him at the same time 212 sculptures with a total of 600 figures. The largest and most important of them is the obelisk of tangled bodies, which stood in the middle of the park.

Despite the help of other sculptors, it took over ten years to complete the project (the park was opened in 1943), and the artist himself did not live long enough to see it. Continuing the work after his death was possible only thanks to the fact that he left detailed notes on how the whole thing should look like.

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So much for history. If you are curious about the details, check out Wikipedia or google some articles. I, however, will focus on something completely different - the emotions associated with visiting this place.

The park impresses with its enormity, it pushes it into the ground with its power, additionally reinforcing the feeling of smallness with a huge obelisk at the center. This littleness, however, is not the most important feeling. I focused more on the strangeness of the whole structure, on the specific surrealism accompanying the sculptures. The characters come in all stages of life - from infancy, through childhood, to adulthood, to old age. They depict all emotions - anger, joy, sadness, and excitement. Some are quite standard, but the majority is quite bizarre: children riding their mother like a horse, gagging her mouth with a braid, adults in the process of sophisticated wrestling, which is difficult to clearly define whether it is a superhero stage act or a sophisticated BDSM sex... Speaking of sex and violence, it is worth emphasizing that these two threads in the sculptures are very present - hitting, kicking and other acts of anger expressed in the physical violence are quite popular, but taking into account the time in which the whole thing was designed, the experiences of the author with the World War I & II, it is no wonder that these motives seemed very natural to him when he portrayed humanity. In terms of sex, the whole thing is a little less clear-cut. These are not performances straight from the Kamasutra, but eroticism is hidden in many representations of adult characters. The obelisk of tangled bodies in the center also gives me such associations.

The park hides many interesting facts. There is a place for a playground here, surrounded by sculptures of playing children. There are unusual sculptures, each of which has its own story: one was completed only a few months before the model who posed for it was taken to Auschwitz. Another broke down several times and the artist had to start sculpting it from scratch… Reaching for a guide from the Tourist Information and visiting the park while reading about all these stories, is the best way to establish emotional contact with the artist and understand the emotions that accompanied the creation of this unique place on the map of Oslo.

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