Masks were rare and social distances varied, but the human chain spread out, as protestors in Oslo braved the risk of COVID-19 infection in a last-ditch bid to save a building adorned by Spanish master painter Pablo Picasso.
Damaged in right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik’s July 2011 attacks, the “Y Block,” a government building complex named for its shape and completed in 1969, is to be demolished soon.
On its grey cement walls are two Picasso drawings, sandblasted by Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar, who collaborated with the Spaniard.
Photo: AFP
On the facade facing the street, The Fishermen depicts three men hauling their oversized catch on board their boat. In the lobby, The Seagull shows the bird, its wings spread wide, devouring a fish.
Etched in the Spanish painter’s childlike strokes, the two works would be cut out and relocated to new government buildings due to be built in the central Oslo neighborhood.
However, not everyone likes that plan.
“We’re going to be kicking ourselves for years,” said Erik Lie, one of the about 200 Norwegians who came to protest the demolition.
“I hope it’s not too late,” he said.“But this will probably be a pile of rubble soon.”
Because of COVID-19, protesters were linked by meter-long ribbons in a bid to keep them at a safe distance from one another.
The Norwegian Directorate of Public Construction and Property, which oversees the demolition, said the murals are to be dismantled before the end of spring.
The nearby “H Block” building, built in the late 1950s and which has three other Picasso murals, was home to the prime minister’s offices until Breivik blew up a van loaded with 950kg of explosives at its base.
“H Block” would be renovated and continue to tower over the new ministry buildings.
“‘Y Block’ is an iconic building in Oslo that has survived a terrorist attack, and now the government wants to tear it down, and nobody can actually give a good argument for why they should,” said Tone Dalen, one of the protests’ figureheads.
The government said that the demolition to make space for new buildings was a difficult, but necessary decision.
“It will improve security and accessibility for cyclists and pedestrians, and will provide a more open and greener space, as well as offices suited to the future ministries,” Minister of Local Government Nikolai Astrup said.
“A lot of people think that it’s Picasso that deserves to be preserved, but it’s also the architecture and the interaction between ‘Y Block’ and ‘H Block,’ the history that it represents,” Lie said.
“These are monuments that illustrate the rebuilding of Norway after the war, and everything that I associate with the development of modern society,” he added.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
RSS