Houses of Darkness: Perpetrator Perspectives presents a series of creative interventions into Falstad’s Commander’s villa. Since 2021, the German photographer Jakob Ganslmeier and the Norwegian author Simon Stranger made several visits to Falstad. In video installations and texts, they examine and imagine the meanings of ‘perpetrator perspectives’ by asking qustions such as: What are our culture’s images of perpetrators? How did the last SS commander at Falstad picture himself? And what binds the generation of post-war children to their home’s distant past? The exhibition is produced by Paradox in collaboration with the Falstad Centre.
The exhibition is part of the European culture cooperation project addressing perpetrator perspectives in contemporary Nazi prison camp memorials. Artists and audiences engage in creative explorations of ‘perpetrator spaces’ – the remains of the camp commanders’ homes and offices – at three different European memorial sites: Bergen-Belsen Memorial in Germany, Camp Westerbork Memorial Centre in the Netherlands, and the Falstad Centre in Norway.
