Site of Munch's house, Ekely
(now a car park)
Concept by Alan O'Cain
7 May 2012
The idea to create a full-scale "outline" replica of Edvard Munch's lost Oslo Ekely house came to me in 2008 when I was artist-in-residence in Munch's still-preserved Ekely studio. Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) bought the 11¼ acre Ekely estate in 1916 and lived and worked there until his death. Munch's Winter Studio, built to his exact specifications, still stands, but the house, crammed with artworks, possessions and papers (since removed), was demolished in 1960.
A tarmac parking area now marks where the house once stood. Remnants of Munch's garden, featured in several of his paintings, can still be identified beside it. Munch had no love for his Ekely house, and much of his time there was spent living as an elderly recluse. Darkness unnerved him, and he kept lights burning and radios playing in most rooms throughout the night.
The decision to demolish the house in 1960 was controversial. Other houses Munch owned were preserved, but this large wooden property was the place in which he had died. Even now its ghostly presence seems to haunt the tarmac area where Munch once lived.
Over the years, a number of schemes have been suggested to resurrect the house, and a mock facade was created for an exhibition in Emden, Germany in recent times. But my project involves creating something different: a full-size 3D outline of the building, illuminated in glowing red.
For a long time I speculated where this "phoenix" house could be displayed. For a while I imagined placing it in the sea, reflecting light in the water, as the moon in so many of Munch's iconic works. This website was originally developed with that in mind. But in January 2012, a new idea struck me, something equally spectacular: to place this installation in the sky.
I had already identified Sunderland (my birth-town) as my preferred location, and now I remembered the trio of tower blocks erected in the city in 1969. The roof of any one of the three, I conjectured, could be ideal. Following an initial exploration of the concept with the tower blocks' owners, it transpired that the roof-spaces were virtually made to measure. Someone was bringing serendipity into play!
And so the project moves on. Placing The Screaming House on the roof of a tower block is much simpler than siting the structure in the sea. But the concept retains its gravitas, and its relevance to Munch and to me. Munch knew his paintings - his "children" as he called them - would be dispersed to the four winds. Yet they would live on, he believed (anticipating the internet "cloud"?) on the walls of "castles in the air".
So Munch's lost house can rise from the dead. And burn majestically in the heavens, facing out towards Norway across the raging sea. And for a short time a glowing sentinel can hover over Sunderland, bringing the light of art into the lives of men, women and children below, inviting travellers on their journeys to stop and think about humanity's fleeting presence on this planet and the power of a dream.
Thank you for reading this far. And I leave you with the words of Munch:
"I am like the sleepwalker who walks on the ridge of a roof - sure-footed and calm he walks without seeing without hearing - Oh someone shouts at him - louder and louder - he wakes up and he falls off of the roof - down from his dreams - Don't do that to me - that - I walk calmly in my dreams which are my life - only like that can I live"TOP OF PAGE