If there is a place in Denmark where the past has carved a crack in time and inscribed a geography of hope it is in Gilleleje, a former fishing village on the north coast of Zealand. It was the sea here that provided an escape route for around 1,300 Danish Jews in October 1943. It was here they were hidden then sent across the Sound in fishing boats to Sweden.
October 2023 marked the 80th anniversary of an event that represented a chink of light, a chink of hope during a dark chapter in history. An event that deserves to be remembered and commemorated. Which is what the memorial Displaced Horizon does. A sculptural work of art that marks and commemorates the place where the courage of local people made the escape of others possible.
The memorial Displaced Horizon consists of a 10-tonne granite boulder placed at the edge of a natural plateau. From here steps made of unhewn stone lead down to the shore. The backdrop for the memorial is the landscape of the sea: its light, water, rocks and horizon. The boulder has been cut through and its top displaced, creating a line in the sculpture in line with the horizon. The cut has been polished smooth and carved with the inscription October 1943. The rest of the boulder has been left untouched with the marks and indentations left by its formation over millions of years.
The stone rests directly on the earth. There is no plinth. You can walk right up to and around the entire sculpture, your body in contact with the solidity and sheer weight of the granite. As you come closer the tactile surface of the boulder becomes visible and an inscription can be traced and touched by hand: the difference between a raw and polished surface. The inscription October 1943 is embedded in the surface of the rock as if time had stood still. The past remembered - a memorial.
The Danish word for memorial is mindesmærke, a compound of the word for ‘remind’ and the mind at work within it, and the word for ‘mark’. A mark has a physical presence and a place in the world: a body, a geography. Displaced Horizon is both a physically sensed mark and something immaterial taking place in the place it rests. It evokes and holds onto memory over time. To be forced to flee for your life – to leave where you come from, your friends, your family, everything that anchors you in the world – is an experience of violence, a life-threatening, existential rupture. Something that was once whole now torn apart. Like the displacement of the top of the boulder – something complete and in one piece broken and forced apart.
Yet at the same time the memorial raises our eyes to the horizon. The cut in the boulder draws a straight line in the landscape, underlining the universal fixed point of the line of the horizon. Reminding us that looking towards the horizon, towards Sweden, represented possibility and hope for those fleeing for their lives. The artwork connects that memory to this specific site, to the landscape and history of Gilleleje. At the same time as going beyond time and place by creating a new sculptural fixed point in the universe. A geography of hope.
Charlotte Bagger Brandt
Translaton: Jane Rowley
Facts
Artist: Karin Lind
Displaced Horizon, 2023, Memorial ground, 22 Nordre Strandvej, Gilleleje, Denmark
The artwork consists of a split granite boulder with an inscription, two oak benches and unhewn stone steps to th e shore with an oak railing.
The boulder is 300 cm long, 170 cm wide and 185 cm high, and weighs approximately 10 tonnes.
The memorial is made in collaboration with Gribskov Municipality and art consultant Charlo]e Bagger Brandt/Råderum.
Memorial costs generously donated by an anonymous foundation.