From the Earth I Have Come – Duodji Art Textile, Decolonisation and Language Revitalisation

Artistic research in Sámi craft and design—duodji—opens perspectives on resilience, resistance, and renewal within the worlds of minoritized languages. In my artistic research practice, stories and language often form the point of departure for creative production. I interpret stories and oral traditions through duodji. Words do not live only in speech; they breathe through the work of the hands, in materials, in embodied knowledge, and in the land to which they are rooted.
The connection and interdependence between the Sámi language and duodji form a woven structure in which history is not a relic of the past, but a continuously renewing, living culture. Oral tradition brings forth the community’s strategies for maintaining linguistic autonomy and cultural distinctiveness despite headwinds.
The research draws on experimental art practices and methodologies of artistic research, through which Sámi craft and design unfold not only as processes of material making but also as forms of knowledge, world making, and quiet resistance. Each stitch, material, and instance of embodied knowledge carries within it the rhythm of language—not merely through names, but as a way of perceiving, sensing, and shaping relationality. In the research, language, craft, and culture emerge like a three part breathing pathway: none can live without the others. In this context, artistic research becomes a space of recovery, where even fragile linguistic threads can strengthen, and where making generates new possibilities for imagination. The research shows that material practices, linguistic meanings, and communal memories form a space and place where tradition can move, transform, and continue to breathe.
I interpret duodji within its own context. I have developed a theoretical approach for interpreting duodji. The structure of the gákti opens a linguistic and cultural standpoint from which duodji can be examined, enabling a decolonial rethinking of design and craft research traditions.