ABSTRACT

I visited the island of Utøya in Tyrifjorden, Norway, on 27 September 2014, on one of the first occasions that the island was open to the general public after the mass shooting that took place on 22 July 2011. 1 Disguised as a policeman, extreme right-wing perpetrator Anders Bering Breivik went on a shooting spree on the small island hosting a yearly summer camp for the youth organization of the Norwegian Labour Party, killing sixty-nine people and wounding another sixty-six. I believe my own urge to go to this crime scene was in order to experience something of the event for myself, and to try to understand what motivates many tourists to travel to dark sites. In a sense, dark tourism is always about connecting with ghosts, paradoxically embodying what is no longer there, but making it physically present and tangible through affects: the feel of more or less remote, and certainly more or less worked through, pasts. The dark tourist is also an interesting, paradoxical figure in a modernist Western paradigm of all-pervasive visibility, surveillance and theatricality. 2 She/he is part of the developing creative industries, as well as the tourism and heritage sectors, and, whether the dark tourist wants it or not, she/he is part of an industry that thrives on spectacle and staging. On the other hand, the dark tourist is looking for something that is not there, for the possibility of relating to the ghosts of the past. Although there are all sorts of motivations to be dark tourists, I believe the primary motivation is to connect with something that is no longer there.