Memorializing the gates of hell: Reflections on the nexus of trauma, art, and history-telling

Memorializing the gates of hell: Reflections on the nexus of trauma, art, and history-telling

Anna Papaeti

This essay is part of an ongoing process of reflection with regard to representing traumatic histories through artistic means and the process of memorialization.¹ It takes as its starting point my 2021 visits to two places that have been described as gates of hell. The first was the island of Gyaros in the Cyclades (Greece). Α place of exile during Roman times, it was then used for political prisoners in modern Greece during the civil war (1946-1949) and the post-civil war period, as well as the military dictatorship (1967-1974). The second was the town of Vardø, the furthest northeast place in Norway, further east than Istanbul or St. Petersburg. A border (by sea) with Russia, Vardø has a difficult World-War-II and Cold-War history. It is also infamous for the repression of “witches” in the seventeenth century. Both islands—one in the middle of the Aegean and the other in the Circumpolar North by Barents Sea—are places of traumatic histories that are not always visible or audible in present times. Both places also share two striking memorials created for those who perished from torture and abuse. My trips there were part of the Transmissions sound-art residency exchange that included myself and Norwegian sound artist Maia Urstad.² The Greek intermedia duo acte vide, who provided the original theme and conceptual background for the residency exchange, took on the role of artist-respondents for both field visits; Karolin Tampere curated the North Norway part.³ Collecting stories, sounds, and all kinds of material to be used in works of sound art, Maia and I have found ourselves faced with numerous questions about the representation of trauma, history-telling, the ethics of listening, and the very process of memorialization. Although our own process of reflecting critically on these histories is still underway, in this essay I discuss two memorials we encountered and the nexus of memory, trauma, and representation they address.

Landing on the island of Gyaros, at the cove that overlooks the prison camp, I was reminded of a political prisoner of the military dictatorship I interviewed back in 2011. A medical student at the time, “A” had once recited lines from Dante’s Inferno to describe the feeling of hopelessness she experienced upon entering the prison building at Gyaros.⁴ “A” had been detained in Gyaros for a year in 1967. Her father had also been a political prisoner there in the late 1940s; he and his fellow detainees were forced to build their own prison through hard labour. Gyaros became a detention place for male communists and leftists after British prompting in 1947.

Closed in 1952, it reopened from 1955 to 1961. During the first year of the military dictatorship the island was used again (for men, women and one child), but was closed down due to international outcry for its appalling living conditions. It was used again from November 1974 to the fall of the regime in July 1974 (all men). During its one-year operation in 1967 thousands of communists and leftists were detained there; many of them were gradually transferred to other detention sites such as Lakki (Leros) or Alikarnarnassos (Crete). The women and leaders of the Communist Party and other organizations stayed inside the prison building; the rest stayed in tents. The women were housed in four dorms.

According to “X”, a male political prisoner I interviewed, the women suffered greatly due to the building’s appalling living conditions.⁵ In our first meeting “A” talked vividly about the horrors experienced by women inside the building. Approximately 150 women were forced to stay in one dorm that had the capacity for half of them, packed like sardines and sleeping “head across legs”. She recalled:

A room five-metre-high, no windows. Up at the top there were openings and on the outside a parapet from where the guards would pass and look inside. No privacy, no nothing. Life there was tragically difficult. […] We did not sleep or wake up like normal people. In our sleep we heard screams, women having nightmares, …that kind of thing. But what was terrible was the morning wake-up call with loud, blasting music.

The building’s punitive character is expressed in its architecture, its distribution of space, its materials, the parapets up on the dorms’ outer walls inviting in wind and rain, as well as the surveillance spots for guards that deprived prisoners—male and female—of any sense of privacy. Walking through a mix of rubble, soil, and animal excrements (wild goats currently inhabit the building), we were struck by the still visible differences between the quarters or even the kitchen for camp personnel and those for prisoners. Passing through what seemed like an endless labyrinth, dorms and courtyards replicated each other; isolation cells sealed away from sound and light still bore scribbles on the walls. Exiting the prison labyrinth on the back of the building, we came to the site of the memorial created in 2019 by sculptor Antonis Myrodias, after a competition, commissioned, funded, and executed by the Greek Communist Party (KKE). Titled Rogmi (Crack), the memorial commemorates those detained and tortured in Gyaros.

The party’s intention was not only an attempt to commemorate past traumas and struggles. By memorializing this history, it wished to prevent any tourist or other development on the island. Even though in 2002 Gyaros was labelled as a historical place and its buildings were listed, this was partly dropped in 2011 leaving the island vulnerable to the prospect of “development.” Though the derelict buildings are still listed, one cannot help but sense the intentionality behind their abandonment; a study for their preservation by the National Technical University, Athens, seems to have been conveniently shelved.

Soon it will no longer be possible to visit them due to health and safety concerns. In fact, we were unable to visit large parts of the prison for this reason. Eventually the buildings will be demolished, the area will be flattened, and historical memory erased.

The monument consists of two pillars made of a kind of steel that endures harsh climates but easily acquires a rusty surface, thus blending in with the rust that pervades the camp building. Ten meters long, the phallic-looking pillars piercing the sky complement the vastness of the prison building, depicting aesthetically and visually the oppressive nature of power. Seen from afar, it looks like a deconstructed crematorium placed alongside the building.

Twenty-one stainless-steel reflectors installed on the pillars catch the natural light and disrupt the totalizing effect of the pillars. According to Myrodias, their number denotes the 21 years of the camps’ operation: emerging like cracks out of the steel, the reflectors represent the class struggle to overthrow corrupt regimes (P., 2019). Placed at a distance with each other and looking like empty shells, the two pillars create a hollow space, an opening at its crux, where visitors can enter. Enclosedness and openness are entangled in this memorial, and are complemented by the sensation of sound and light that resonate from the wind, the sun, and the reflectors. A stone-wall surrounds it, alluding to the hard labour of the civil-war prisoners, forced to carve out stones in order to flatten the mountain where the building would be eventually built. The wall features plaques with the names of those who perished on the island, predominantly men.

Coming to the end of the painful passage through the camp building, the memorial offered a sense of relief and at the same time constituted a culmination of the experience. Relief here does not suggest in any way a weakening of the hit experienced inside the building. It was rather indebted to the fact that this oppressing building was not the last word: the monument signifies an acknowledgement and at the same time a response to the ordeal of political prisoners. Its emphasis on cracks and traces of history and materials is in counterpoint with the camp building but also the overall setting of the area—a rocky barren island enclosed by the sea. The devastating sight of the camps alongside the sea provides an inescapable context that connects the past with the present. Standing inside the memorial, between the camp and the Aegean Sea (a wet grave for so many in recent years), one is reminded that the struggle against detention and abuse is in no way complete. Once an archipelago of detention sites from the late 1940s to the mid-70s, Greece continues to detain thousands of migrants and refugees fleeing conflict, consistently conducting human rights abuses under the auspices of the EU.

The memorial’s abstract allusion to struggle through traces rather than positive figures contributes to its sense of openness. That it was organized, funded, and executed by KKE raises the question of who acts as a gateway to the history and legacy of resistance and of past struggles of the left. In the case of Gyaros, the Greek state has abandoned a historical site of torture and abuse that will fall into utter ruin in the near future. By deciding not to recognize the island as a place of historical value, the state refuses to officially map it as such. It also refuses to symbolically recognize its own complicity in this history and to make visible a place that has been systematically kept out of the sight and reach of the public. Soon after the prison was built, the state expropriated land owned by farmers from the neighbouring island of Syros (so-called Giourgiani), who had animals and beehives on Gyaros. Talking with their grandchildren in Syros, another—not so well known—story of Gyaros emerges. It is a story of homeliness and nostalgia but also of resistance: a radio transmitter had been placed on the island during WWII by the Allies, giving information about the movement of German ships; the radio transmitter was never found and the family was instrumental in hiding the resistance fighters. With the building of the camps and the expropriation of land, the island became inaccessible to civilians. In later years, after the fall of the dictatorship, Gyaros was used by the Greek Navy for military exercises until 2000. At present the public is still not allowed to visit Gyaros. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is currently in charge of patrolling the island and monitoring wildlife which has thrived in the absence of humans: a large population of Monachus monachus seals and rare birds are listed among its permanent inhabitants.

The island’s fate remains undecided as long as no legal categorization prevents any “development” from taking place there. This is the gap that KKE aimed at addressing in an attempt to make visible, commemorate, and symbolically inscribe this painful history in the public historical record. Making a memorial at Gyaros, an uninhabited island without electricity, water or housing, was not an easy task. According to our WWF guide, the KKE brought in bulldozes, electricity generators, ovens and fridges in order make this possible. They cleaned part of the entrance to the prison building where they stayed during their time there. All technicians and crew were party members.⁶ In filling this void caused by the state’s inaction, the KKE also becomes in a sense the gatekeeper of the history of the left through the commission and execution of memorials like this one.⁷ The KKE is a historic party whose struggles predominate this past. However, the party underwent a painful split into the “KKE of Exterior” and “KKE of Interior” during the first year of the dictatorship. Also, one cannot ignore the long history of other leftist organizations, for instance Trotskyists, that have an equally long history, or youth movements (e.g. Lambrakis Youth Movement) and student groups that emerged in the 1960s. Such nuances are inevitably not privileged in a historical narrative endorsed by the KKE. Telling are, for instance, recent reactions to a documentary by Marilena Katsimi (2018) about the infamous Makronissos detention camps during the (post) civil-war period. The point of contention was the so-called declarations of repentance which detainees were forced to sign after systematic torture, renouncing the communist party. The declarations constitute a trauma for the communist left: those who signed were denounced by the KKE and stigmatized even though they had signed under duress, or even if they later retracted them. In the documentary historians Stratis Bournazos and Tassos Sakellaropoulos, both experts on Makronissos, stated that most of the detainees eventually signed declarations, a point which is accepted and acknowledged by left-wing historians (see Voglis, 2002, pp. 184-185). KKE’s reaction underlines the way it wishes to control the memory of resistance by privileging heroism but also by repressing its own inability to adequately support its members at a time when they were severely abused.⁸ In the case of the memorial, despite its title, Crack, and its hollowness, the phallic design piercing the sky alludes to a seamless narrative of heroism, broken but persistent and (morally) triumphant. With its name inscribed on the Gyaros memorial’s wall, the KKE claims its role in the memory of this history, in shaping the narrative of resistance, understanding detainees as political and predominantly communist subjects. In the opening ceremony on the island, which consisted of KKE members of different generations and former political prisoners, visibly moved the general secretary Dimitris Koutsoumpas talked about communists and other freedom fighters (agonistes—using the masculine noun), class struggle, the fight between the old and new order, focusing on the struggles of the communist labour movement in Greece. Additionally, the inscription of the names of those who perished on the island mostly during the (post) civil-war period are all male but one (Eleftheria Kalampoki, one of the two people to die during the dictatorship), unwittingly leaves out the strong presence of women in the camp building from 1967 to 1968, but also of leftists from other movements and political formations during that time. For me, having been struck by the women’s testimonies and our encounter, their absence was striking on the walls of this memorial.

Can memorials adequately honour microhistories, allow for nuances, and offer insights into traumatic history in an artistic strategy that avoids realistic and figurative representation, opting instead for a broader abstract artistic strategy of negative or indirect presentation? The dangers harboured by positive representation with regard to trivialization and/or sentimentalization of trauma have been eloquently discussed by Theodor W. Adorno in his “after Auschwitz” critique in a series of essays and texts (Adorno, 1973, 1981a, 1981b, 1992). The answer to my question, or rather more food for thought and reflection came from my encounter with the Steilneset Memorial in Vardø, Northern Norway. The memorial presents us with a different approach of history, a very different history of funding and commission, as well as aesthetic. Its topic is an equally difficult one: namely the burning of 77 women and 14 men condemned for witchcraft between 1600 and 1692. Part of the witches trials that took place in Norway, the Vardø trials were great both in number and in actual executions. The commission of the work took place in the context of the National Tourist Routes across Norway, bringing together the town of Vardø, the Varanger Museum (Finnmark), and the Norwegian Public Roads Administration. Contrary to Rogmi, the Steilneset Memorial constituted an official acknowledgement by the state of the way women and Sami people were abused and murdered in the past; Sami are the indigenous population of Sápmi, which crosses over the borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. The memorial was also part of a large project to create tourist attractions across Norway. Its eight-figure budget ($15 million) initially raised eyebrows to some members of the local community. Many felt that their community was forgotten by the state which had not addressed the serious problems they were facing such as unemployment and migration, and the enclosure of natural resources by large companies through fish quota and licences, leading to the closing down of fish factories and harbours, to the inability of individuals to sell fish, thus furthering unemployment and migration to big cities.⁹ In this context, a budget of this scale for contemporary art seemed unfathomable. Nevertheless, the community was quick to endorse the project once it was completed, acknowledging its important contribution to a history that had remained silenced and invisible.¹⁰

The memorial’s design was directly assigned to Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, marking this one of the few commissions for the National Tourist Road that employed non-Norwegian designers and artists. It is interesting to note that Bourgeois gifted her installation titled The Damned, the Possessed and the Beloved, one of her last works, to the town of Vardø as a gesture of “her long-standing commitment of fighting injustice” (Anon, 2011).The memorial opened in 2011. Contrary to the intimate and small-scale ceremony on Gyaros, featuring young and old members of a small yet historic communist party, the “witches memorial” opening received the full support and acknowledgment of the state and the royal family. The memorial was opened by the Queen of Norway on June 23, 2011. Steilneset, she noted, “is a symbol of the intolerance of the period, but can also serve to remind us of the prejudices, injustices and persecution that exist today” (Anon, 2011). The connection between past and present was also made in a talk about contemporary violations of human rights given by the General Secretary of the Church City Mission after the special service on the day of the opening: “The memorial is meant to remind us of the ongoing danger of collectively creating scapegoats. If historical circumstances seem peculiar now, the intent behind the work addresses larger moral claims” (Stephens, 2011).

The Steilneset Memorial is positioned between the sea and a Christian cemetery, overlooking Mount Domen (see picture 8 across the sea). At the time Domen was considered as the end of the world (Ultima Thule), situated near the gateway to hell, a nearby cave. Women were reportedly seen dancing on Domen or near the cave, in what was perceived to be an encounter with Satan. Intentional or not, the positioning of the memorial at this very place brings together historical and sensorial elements that negatively invoke elements of the story: burial and cemetery (i.e. “sleeping” place) versus burning (literal and eternal); Christianity versus Mount Domen; the sea. The prison of the accused was right next to the sea, which was felt in terms of sound and dampness. The sea was also heavily implicated in torture through the water ordeal. To prove their innocence, the accused were placed in deep sea with their hands tied at their back (a stress position by today’s torture terminology): floating was a sign of culpability; sinking would profess their innocence. Either way their fate was sealed. All of them floated and were killed soon after.

Initially only one installation was planned. However, when Peter Zumthor sent to Louise Bourgeois his design for the monument, she liked it but considered it complete, and requested another construction for her own work.¹¹ The two installations are in dialogue with each other; together they effect a hit on the visitor. Going through them is an intense experience that does not, nevertheless, encourage immersion but positions one as an observer. The first installation, designed by Zumthor, is a large wooden construction, enclosed like a cocoon by fiberglass fabric. A delicate structure susceptible to winds, on the outside it resembles wooden fish drying racks often encountered in Finnmark. Inside, a dark 125-meter-long corridor-like structure features 91 windows on both sides, which equal the number of those perished. Small and square they bring to mind prison cell windows; a faintly lit light bulb hangs above each one. That the memorial is open on a 24-hour basis means that sensorial experience within this installation is varied in terms of light and sound in different moments, mirroring the experience of the accused in detention. Next to each window, the story of each victim is hanging printed on black fabric. Fragments of information retrieved from the trials’ court records feature the charges, the arrest, the ordeal(s), the protest and in most cases the confession, as well as marital status, town, ethnicity/nationality: 77 women (predominantly Norwegian, one Danish, and some Sami); 13 Sami men, many of whom were noaidi—a kind of shaman for the Sami people (see Hagen, 2020)—and one Norwegian, a friend of a Sami man. Abstract numbers give way to names.¹² Elliptic microhistories allow for the nuances and positionality of those perished to emerge, alongside a faint picture of social bonds, public life, natural disasters, dispossession, interrogation, torture, and false confession.

A small black booklet of the same aesthetic is available for free in Norwegian, English and other languages so that visitors can follow the stories there and at home. Walking through the claustrophobic, dark and long corridor while reading the victims’ stories, wishing to do justice to all of them, to not leave one behind, unread, unrecognized, is an arduous process. As Suzanne Stephens (2011) put it, “[t]he feeling is like being in the stomach of some prehistoric creature, half-fish, half-reptile’ except there is a glimmer of light”. For me, it very much resembled the hit experienced walking inside the prison camp in Gyaros in its claustrophobic endlessness, the darkness, but also the horror of the women’s stories I carried with me, which echoed here in the stories of their Nordic sisters.

Coming out of it, a few steps away is the Bourgeois installation inside a cube-shaped glass pavilion. Its title The Damned, the Possessed and the Beloved bears the mix of tenderness and violence characteristic of her work. A steel chair placed at the centre of the space is permanently in flames. The chair is surrounded from below by a circular low construction that alludes to a hearth and from above by hanging circular mirrors that look like judges. Not only do the mirrors reflect the flames. They also reflect the visitors, thus implicating us in what is taking place and raising the question of our responsibility as witnesses to injustice and abuse in the present but also in the past.

The burning chair and the “hearth”-like construction allude to the notion of Hestia, the goddess of hearth, of domesticity, of home. Contrary to the rather masculine heroism implicit in the Gyaros memorial placed out in the open and in public sight, Bourgeois’ enclosed installation alludes to the private and domestic where women were forced to inhabit. It is also the space where they had social visibility and expressed themselves more freely. It is precisely these bonds and social exchange that were attacked during the witch-hunt. The use of the word “Beloved” is polysemic here. It points to the banishing of women to the sphere of the domestic/private, invoking the undertones of an essentialized notion of womanhood understood as innocent and emotionally nurturing. As Silvia Federici points out, the “bourgeois ideals of womanhood and domesticity were forged” at the same time as the witch-hunt that effected the social destruction of women and asserted state control over their bodies and reproduction (Federici, 2004, p.186). The word may also point to Tony Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), which centres on the repressed trauma of an American-African mother who kills her daughter in order to free her from slavery. Morrison masterfully weaves together the clash of two worlds, and the way the horrors of slavery are inscribed on the bodies and the minds of the enslaved, on the self, the family, as well as society. Bourgeois’ “Beloved” too represents a repressed trauma that comes back to haunt us, a painful past that has been silenced, grounded on a clash of values and worlds. As Federici has shown, the witch-trials were linked to the advent of capitalism, the destruction of the peasantry and the formation of the modern proletariat (Federici, 2018). It led to the violent incorporation of women’s labour into the workforce, and deepened the division between men and women, whom men came to fear (Federici, 2018; Federici, 2004, p. 188); in the case of Vardø this division had racial undertones as well and was extended between Norwegian and Sami population. Practices predominantly associated with women (folk healer, herbalist, midwife) and the Sami community were seen as undermining the “power of the authorities and the state” (see Federici, 2004, p. 174), incompatible with the values of capitalism. Eradicating these, as Federici notes, led to “another form of enclosure” giving way to “the rise of professional medicine […] unaffordable and alien” for the lower classes (Federici, 2004, p. 201).

Both Vardø installations invoke a dialectic between the domestic/private and the public. Though Zumthor’s installation alludes to such institutions as prisons, courts and more generally the state, the domestic/private emerges through the fragments of the stories that hang on the walls. Bourgeois’ work brings to the fore more abstractly the attack of domesticity and social bonds through the burning chair. The hearth and the chair are no longer symbols of intimate domestic space, but symbols of a burning hell on earth. Allusions to judges (state, justice, society) are separated from this space and placed on top as a panopticon of power that surveils, controls, and eventually undoes the domestic. Alongside the Beloved, friends, neighbours, a network of social ties (the accused and the possessed) implicated by association are also found guilty of the crime of witchcraft. The elliptical stories show how this intimate environment is gradually undone through torture and false confessions given under duress; husbands helplessly defending their wives; women refusing to implicate others or confess; detention, interrogation, and torture; unacceptable friendships with Sami; misperceived healing powers of women; property and land dispossession by the king. Their inclusion does not only shed light to the individual stories. It is also an invitation to find out more about this invisible history.

The dialectic between the two works that comprise the Steilneset Memorial successfully manages to weave together micro and macro history, constituting a “learning” experience in the Brechtian sense of critical reflection where past and present struggles resonate together. Together they provide visitors with a context (historical, archival, sensorial) that inscribes trauma in the public space and historical record without positively representing it. Indeed negative presentation is a strong strategy for memorializing such history in its openness, indirectness, and abstraction. However, the lack of context can neutralize a monument and the very process of memoralization, which must remain incomplete so to speak: in addressing visitors, the memorial seeks to generate reflection, response, or at least public interest. Take, for instance, Peter Eisenman’s Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas). A claustrophobic and silent labyrinth, it consists of 2710 columns of different shapes placed in 19,073 square meters. An endless field of graves—nameless and without symbols—it alludes to the Holocaust and constitutes a negative presentation of this traumatic history.¹³ However, that the memorial is visibly surrounded by tourist coaches, cafes and fast-food restaurants at the back street for tourists to eat after their visit, creates a sense of vulgarity. Also problematic are the numerous selfies of visitors taken with family or friends or, for instance, yoga poses neutralizing the critical potential of the work.¹⁴ The failure of the memorial to effect a hit on visitors brings to mind the proposal of artist Horst Hoheisel for the first competition of this memorial that took place in 1994, and was later cancelled the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Hoheisel’s proposal connected the space intended for the memorial with the Brandenburg Gate. A symbol of German (but also Nazi) national pride, the Brandenburg Gate was to be destroyed by explosion; its dust and traces would be scattered at the space dedicated for the memorial which would be empty, paved with the granite plates used for Berlin’s pavements.¹⁵ The space where the Brandenburg Gate once proudly stood would also remain empty. Hoheisel’s proposal was obviously rejected from the first round. As James E. Young (in Hoheisel, 2017) puts it, the idea of representing the destruction of a people with the destruction of a monument of national pride, memorializing the murdered people through the void was perhaps the best way one can talk about the Holocaust—that is through destruction and absence.

The question of how to represent traumatic history remains an open one. A dialectic with the context of the trauma revisited through materials, archival, visual, sensorial traces or other elliptic references, even through absence itself, emerges as an important perspective that allows for memorials to communicate with uninformed audiences and to retain the potency of a hit long after they are built. To this end, both memorials on Gyaros and Vardø successfully manage to weave traces of the past making it difficult for the public to decontextualize the works and to “enjoy” their time there. In the case of Rogmi, placing the work right next to the prison camp, a silent witness of the traumas of the past and an allusion to the horrors of the present, is a strong and visibly inescapable context that allows for a more abstract and elliptic work. Returning to the Steilneset Memorial at different times during my stay in Vardø, the women of Gyaros and the oppressive feeling of walking through the prison camp always came to mind, both as a feeling and a thought. Despite their differences—aesthetic, historical, geographic—both memorials bear traumatic histories of a class war, of relentless propaganda, and of a long persecution that was internationalized be it of “witches” or “communists.” In their own ways, strategies, histories, and flaws, both memorials constitute sites of reflection of past but also current struggles allowing for inaudible and invisible stories of terror to come to the fore, effecting even momentarily (emotionally and sensorially) the shudder of Dante’s famous lines: ‘abandon all hope, you who enter here’.

Endnotes