The community Hall project – the stories that sit in the walls

04 September 2026

With a car and an audio recorder, I travel around Lofoten to collect the stories of the places where people have met through generations. Community hall, youth centres, prayer houses and old schools – Houses that in various ways have been important meeting places in the villages.

My name is Elin Tinuviel Torbergsen and I work with research and development at Museum Nord. In the Community hall project, I document oral stories about local meeting places in Lofoten and the people who have used them.

The work is part of the Horizon Europe project CONVIVIUM, which, among other things, explores food culture as living cultural heritage. In my work, I am particularly interested in the people, memories and communities around these local meeting places.

Food appears naturally in many of the stories: coffee tables, bazaar food, cakes, feasts and work in the kitchen. It is not so surprising. Where people meet, food is often included. The stories also show that food is about more than what was on the table. It tells about voluntary work, division of labour, local resources, traditions and about doing something together.

In search of human stories

I work with local history societies to find people who have memories and stories to share. I think of them as a kind of historical witnesses.

Our conversations are open, without a fixed list of questions. Whenever possible, we meet at the house to be told about, or at the place where it once stood. I find that the place itself can open up memories. A room, an old photograph or just standing in front of a familiar building can take the conversation in directions I could never have planned in advance.

Afterwards, I transcribe the audio recordings and process the conversations into stories where the people’s own memories are at the center. This is how the stories about, among other things, the youth house at Sand, Sennesvik community hall and the prayer house at Mortsund have come to be. In the material from Sand, the story is based on an audio recording with Konrad Hauge, Robin Rist and Anton Rist. While the stories from Sennesvik and Mortsund are based on conversations with Walfred M. O. Larssen and Wenche Bolle, respectively.

What exactly is a community Hall?

Along the way, I have discovered that “community house” does not mean the same thing to everyone. It has made the very question of what a community hall is, an interesting part of the project.

Konrad Hauge said that “community hall” was a word the villagers knew little about. For them, it was the youth house. The house had been erected because the village needed a place to meet. And here meetings were held, parties and bazaars were arranged, books lent and organisational work was carried out.

Wenche Bolle, on the other hand, is clear that the prayer house at Mortsund was never a community hall. She distinguishes between the prayer house, the school and the community hall. They were all meeting places, but ,had different roles. The prayer house was associated with, among other things, church services, meetings, bazaars and funerals. While the community hall was a freer place for dancing and partying.

In Sennesvik we meet yet another story. Today’s community hall was originally built as a school, but the school was far more than a place for teaching from the start. Films were shown here, Christmas parties were arranged, danced and national day was celebrated. Children, parents, teachers and fishermen used the same house. Later, the school became Sennesvik community hall, and the building still serves as a meeting place.

For me, the question “What exactly is a community hall?” has therefore become an important part of the project. Perhaps there is no single answer. Instead, I have become interested in what the people themselves call the houses, how they have used them, and what significance they have had in the local community.

Why are these stories important?

The houses alone cannot tell the whole story. It is the people who can tell what the houses meant.

Many of these stories are not in the archives. They are in people’s memories. By documenting them now, we can preserve knowledge about everyday life, food culture, voluntary work, parties, faith, organizational life and community. And about how people themselves have helped create the places they belong.

In Sennesvik, for example, the memories are not primarily about the building itself. But about children’s voices, laughter in the gymnasium, coffee tables, the smell of cakes and the feeling of belonging.

For me, the Community Hall project is therefore not primarily about documenting old houses. It is about documenting the life that has taken place in and around them, before the stories disappear.

But the stories are not just about the past. They can tell us something about what creates good local communities today. The community hall and the other meeting places show how people have created places to meet, shared resources and knowledge, worked on a voluntary basis and taken responsibility for the community. Several of the houses have changed function over time. But the need for places where people can meet has not necessarily disappeared.

At a time when many local communities are changing. I therefore think it is worth asking: What does it take for people to meet? What creates a sense of belonging? And what meeting places do we need in the future?

Perhaps part of the answer already lies in the stories that sit in the walls.

About the processing of the stories and the use of ChatGPT

The audio recordings are transcribed and then processed into coherent narratives. In this part of the work, I have used ChatGPT as a linguistic and structural tool. The goal has been to make the oral narratives accessible and alive to the reader. Without losing the content of what the informants have said.

Among the prompts I’ve used are: “Can you rephrase the text into a storytelling without losing the content? I want the reader to be able to create mental images as they read it.”

and: “Can you make suggestions on how the text can be structured better?”

In this way, ChatGPT has been used to suggest formulations, narrative devices and structure. The source material is the interviews and the informants’ own memories and stories. The text that ChatGPT has helped to formulate, I have subsequently reviewed, edited and changed. I have thus made the final editorial choices and am responsible for the finished text.