The Frognerparken gate is massive, high, decorated with bas-reliefs of dragons that trace the Viking tradition. An iron door is open and allows us to enter.
On the right a cafe, on the left a playground for children, animated by their euphoria. In front of us there is an avenue with various branches. We take the straight road until we reach a bridge, long and wide, where the review begins.
58 bronze statues representing men, women and children are installed.
The park is known as Vigeland Park (Vigelandsparken) from the name of the artist who, inside, installed his studio and his home, to realize his humanity of granite, bronze and iron over a period of twenty years .
Vigeland Park - Stone statues
Vigeland Park - Details
The park is huge, covers an area of about 320 hectares, and is divided in half by a stream that opens to form two ponds.
There are statues everywhere. A majestic fountain is made up of six giants holding up a bowl of water surrounded by 20 other sculptures that represent human evolution, from birth to death.
Beyond the fountain opens the terrace of the Monolith, the highest part of the park. It takes its name from the 17-meter column that stands in the middle, where 121 intertwined human figures are depicted. The column, carved in a single piece of granite, is precisely known as the Monolith. Going up the steps leading to the terrace, 36 groups of sculptures meet, men, women, children in different attitudes.
It is a naked humanity, which dresses only with emotions, nothing else.
It seems to tell us that unfounded is all we need. Just a joy, a suffering, it is enough to feel sad or tired, complicit or angry, playful or frustrated to distinguish every moment, to make it unique and different from the others. The statues communicate through materials, through forms and expressions.
Pouting children, crying children, children flying for joy, children with mothers and fathers, figures of adults and the elderly, all united in a single space that extends along the path that culminates on the hill, where adults hug each other, they cling, twist in a spiral of bodies that rises to the sky.
The totem is the apotheosis. It urges us to look up, it suggests a message of moving hope: only together, entwined, can we rise.
There are places that dig, that enter your soul with strength, like a ray of sunshine in the depths of the forest. This humanity of stone is a reflective mirror capable of showing us what we are: vulnerable and strong, angry, serene, playful or sad, young or old, without external covers but dressed in emotions, the only ones that make us all equal.
Vigeland Park - Bronze statues
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