Jenni Laiti calls herself an “artivist.” An environmental artist and activist for Sámi and Indigenous rights and for climate justice, she was born in Inari, Finland into a family of makers. She studied duodji and Sámi culture at the University of Umeå in Sweden and she now lives in Jokkmokk. She describes her work as “a mixture of cultural intervention, installations, and performative direct action, dealing with colonialism, decolonialism, climate justice, and the Sámi people’s rights to their own culture and land.”
Yesterday I listened to a Zoom presentation Laiti did for the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico: “For the next thousand years: A presentation on crafting another world.” She spoke about the importance on non-linear time within landscapes and about the social dialog between nature and people implicit in the art of crafting duodji.
Jenni Laiti also has discussed her work as an artivist in a recent essay for the Kone Foundation, “Art is free when we are free.” She asks “What if we saw making art as a form of being and creating, instead of limiting to activities performed only by certain people? What if we saw art as belonging to everyone because it is part of humanity? Art could live freely, available to everyone, if we set it free.”
Her work comes out of community and is for community. I’m interested in how Laiti shifts the usual paradigm of traditional vs. innovative when it comes to making art and craft. By foregrounding heritage and community, she honors Sápmi culture. But her own installations are more contemporary and beautiful in ways that aren’t traditional “useful,” but rather draw our attention to an ecological issue and to a political response.
In her Zoom presentation for MIFA she discussed the environmental struggles going on now in Sápmi between local Indigneous communities of reindeer herders and others who depend on an intact ecosystem in traditional lands, and foreign and state investors abetted by the Nordic governments. While there have been some successes in fighting, for instance, the wind farms in Sámi homelands in Norway, the number of ongoing conflicts in Sápmi around the environment still persist. In Gállok outside Jokkmokk, where Laiti lives, the British-owned Beowulf iron mine recently got the go-head from the Swedish government, even after the mine has been condemned by the Sámi parliament and the United Nations. Laiti has been active in opposing the mine for many years. She also is part of the Ellos Deatnu! group [Long Live Deatnu!], which supports efforts in the high North to protect the Deatnu, or Tana River, area.
In 2016 the Art Ii Biennial, which hosts site-specific artworks by international artists in the town center and environmental art park of Ii, Finland, on the Gulf of Bothnia, chose eight Sámi artists and/or duojárs to participate in a project titled “The Poetics of Material.” The thematic intent was to look at environmental art and the use of natural materials. Working in collaboration, Outi Pieski, an artist from Finland, and Jenni Laiti created tall walking sticks from tree branches, ornamented with antler, bone, cloth, and metal, which they placed in a “borderless fence” in the birch and shrub landscape near the Iijoki River. They titled their work “Ovdavázzit/ Forewalkers,” to recognize and honor the Sámi ancestors. The ovdavázzit echo the way past walkers decorated their personal staffs; some of the materials, such as copper and colorful yarn, point to the fact that the Sámi also used material from other cultures.
I’m pleased that my publishers, the University of Minnesota Press, and I agreed that we would like to have a photograph of Ovdavázzit/Forewalkers in my upcoming book, From Lapland to Sápmi: Collecting and Returning Sámi Craft and Culture, and that I could talk briefly about Jenni Laiti’s work in the context of contemporary Sámi artists and artisans.
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| “Ovdavázzit/ Forewalkers,” |
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