Workshop Diaries: Three seasons in Sápmi

Sápmi is a world of deep belonging and reciprocity to the land and sea. Sámi practices and beliefs transgress this western colonial binary of states of matter as well as the binaries nature culture, animate and inanimate, physical and spiritual, and the temporalities of past, present and future.
This makes Sápmi a fully real and tangible place, but unrecognised by the colonising nation states of Norway, Finnland, Sweden and Russia. The Sámi are a minority in their own lands and all Sámi languages are still considered endangered.
Although endangered, this world is never purely conceptual, but alive through embedded practices, expressions and ways of being.

Through the open research format of interdisciplinary workshops, this collective project explored alternative knowledge systems, and asked how aspects of intangible cultural heritage can be integrated, amplified or echoed through artistic and spatial practices and how to develop ethical, reciprocal, and relational ways of working with places as guests on /in indigenous land. We prioritised listening, sensing, being in the local seasons and landscapes, and sharing over individual artistic work.

The project presentation aims to capture and communicate the essence of engaging with Sápmi as ongoing artistic research, based on three meetings and examples from a selected interdisciplinary group working in arts and culture– some with Sámi heritage.

It offers tentative proposals on negotiating site specific work in indigenous contexts. The spatial and temporal frameworks of artistic research are questioned as participants demonstrate that alternative spaces enabling rituals, offer more fruitful contexts for cultural conversations. Research here is engagement in building relationships over time. Inherited knowledge hierarchies, ideas of representation and performer/audience relations are inverted. The yoiker does not “yoik someone”, rather the yoik is that someone, just as a dance is that something.