Sameti is a book comprised of photographs Line Løkken made in and around a small cottage on Thokampen, a hill-side farm in Sel Municipality, Oppland County, Norway. The title, Sameti, “I thirst,” refers to the cottage — named by its owner, Marcello Haugen, Norway’s most famous psychic medium.

Since it was built in 1915, Sameti has been open to friends and passersby, and has remained open since Haugen’s death in 1967. Løkken’s photographs, made a century after the cottage was built, depict an environment where objects remain meaningful, powerful agents. Løkken explains, “as a child I was told that if you steal or remove something from the cottage you will not find peace before the item is returned — as an adult I wanted to understand this invisible aura, held within the objects and the surroundings of the cottage.”

Marcello Haugen is still considered Norway’s most famous clairvoyant of all time. It is widely accepted that Sameti and the materials Haugen left behind are imbued — in one sense, Løkken’s project explores the question of how. Løkken continues: “The idea that matter remembers interests me. Contemporary research in physics shows that matter has a kind of memory. Does this explain how Marcello Haugen’s objects are loaded with memory of his life and activities?”

Do objects have a life of their own, regardless of how we perceive them? Do they exist only in the moment we recognize them? Or do they have an independent autonomous being?