A travelling archive and online equivalent for sharing and developing knowledge of Sámi architecture, which also makes space for wider discussion about Indigenous architecture, focussing on cultures of resourcefulness and ingenuity
Context
Overconsumption within capitalist economies is widely recognised as a core determinant of climate breakdown. The production of the endless new—materials, products, food, energy, clothes, etc.—and the systems that enable such cycles of consumption propel global warming and biodiversity collapse. Alternatives take many forms but are often plagued by equally materialist emphases on novelty, reinvention, and superficial trends. In particular, appeals towards Indigenous ways of life as offering solutions to a Modern detachment from nature often repeat limited and limiting colonial definitions, ossifying ways of living by summarising them in particular forms, technologies, or aesthetics.
Practice
This limitation is precisely what the Sámi artist-architect Joar Nango resists by publicly presenting information about traditions of resourcefulness and ingenuity found in Sámi and other Arctic-region Indigenous cultures. Crucial to Nango’s initiative, which is titled the Indigenuity Project, are a number of platforms that collect and disseminate stories, photographs, practices, materials, and writing. These materials form an archive, which is both a library and a travelling exhibition. Named “Girjegumpi” (from “girji”, meaning “book”, and “gumpi”, a small mobile structure used by reindeer herders), this archive hosts workshops and conversations and visits art galleries as a mobile exhibition. By travelling in such a way, Indigenuity Project’s Girjegumpi archive inserts Sámi spatial practices and concepts into existing institutions from which they are often excluded, for example, urban galleries in Norway and abroad. This mobile strategy deliberately reclaims space within institutions and conversations that often exclude Indigenous knowledge, constituting a tactic for building change from within structures of power. The archive is supported by a website offering a digital version of material to an even wider audience.
Avoiding the often rather generalising tone of appeals to Indigenous knowledge, which risk romanticising and essentialising non-Western cultures, the Indigenuity Project collects ways of living that respond to, dismantle, and repurpose objects and systems of the capitalist world. Countering stereotypes of Indigenous cultures that rely on exotic images or folklore, the project presents Indigenous spatial practices as live, contemporary cultures.
Rather than offering a narrow definition of Sámi spatial practice, Nango’s project is emancipatory in the way it creates space for conversations about both, what Indigenous cultures are and what they have not been allowed to be due to social marginalisation. Facilitating these conversations enables the project to move beyond a demonstration of Indigenous typologies (such as the Lavuu, a temporary shelter similar in its aesthetic to the tipi) within gallery spaces. Simply exhibiting a tipi, in Nango’s words, would epitomise a “giant Lavuu syndrome”.
Instead, the Indigenuity Project exhibits and engages with a multitude of outputs—digital, physical, and discursive—hijacking exhibition institutions to transform into relational sites for learning and critical discussion. Foregrounding the resourcefulness of Sámi spatial practice through documenting numerous instances of improvisation, adhocism, recycling, and ingenuity, the project inevitably critiques the wastefulness of capitalist modernity as well as its narrow remits for defining spatial practice.