Blodveien [Blood Road]

Music for a landscape that carries its dead.

In July 1942, a ship docked at Rognan carrying Yugoslav war prisoners from Nazi Germany. A year later, one of them, Miloš Banjac, was shot and killed by the roadside. His brother Marjan painted a cross on the rock with his blood. The people of Rognan still repaint it today, so that everyone who passes is reminded of what happened there.

Thousands of Yugoslav prisoners were sent to Norway during the war to build roads. The work was brutal. In some of the camps, mortality rates rivalled the worst in occupied Europe. Blodveien is a concert film that moves through this landscape by air, by car and on foot.

Across three screens, routes and the ruins of former camp sites emerge alongside archival maps and photographs. A textual narration recalls fragments of history, and of lives interrupted and erased. The electronic score grows slowly from sounds recorded on site. On stage, Tanja Orning’s cello merges with the recorded sound, carrying the weight of the landscape without offering resolution.

Want to know more?

• Blodveien (“The Blood Road”) is a stretch of road near Rognan in Saltdal, Nordland, now part of the E6. It was built mainly by Yugoslav prisoners during the Second World War. Prisoner camps connected to this work were located at Karasjok, Beisfjord, Øvre Jernvann, Botn, Osen, and Korgen. The name was officially recognized on 8 May 1995.
• Knut Olaf Sunde works with what he calls land music, a reference to land art, where landscape and site become part of the work itself. All aerial footage in Blodveien was filmed by Sunde himself, as a licensed pilot.
• The electronics in the piece were developed at Notam.
• Tanja Orning is featured at Ultima with a solo concert, Cello Musique Concrète, and as part of the line-up of Logbook.