The tundra of northern Norway is a long way from the Venice Biennale. Indeed, it is a long way from anywhere, at least viewed through western eyes. To reach the gentle herd of reindeer who are now feeding under the long pale glow of an Arctic sunset, I have ridden for three and a half hours across the snowy wastes, partly in a sled and partly on the back of a snowmobile, pausing halfway at a herders’ hut (no electricity, no water, but nevertheless a cosy refuge). We are somewhere off the road that links the villages of Karasjok and Kautokeino. To the north of us is Hammerfest. North of that, the Barents Sea.
Artist Máret Ánne Sara is with her husband, brother and 18-month-old, the child cheerfully bundled up and goggled against the chill and the snow’s bright glare. She is telling me about the yearly passage of these, her brother’s reindeer, from the tundra up to the northern coastal summer lands, 250km away: how the biggest cow will start to move when she’s heavily pregnant, and the whole herd will inexorably, mysteriously make its way north. “It’s the animals who control everything,” she says. “We just follow them and try to keep them safe.”
Her brother Jovsset Ante Sara is scattering feed as the soft-haired animals prance and jitter across the snow. That’s not a good sign: reindeer have always been able to eat lichen and moss through the Arctic winters, but the unstable climate is increasingly bringing snow that’s too deep for them to find it, as it has this year. Or, as in 2019, periods of warmth that melt the snow, so that when temperatures drop again, impenetrable layers of ice form, keeping the animals from reaching food.
The tundra is changing in other ways, too: as winters get warmer, birchwoods are spreading north by as much as 50 metres a year. “When we have birch forests, the ground changes and the lichen gets pushed out,” says Sara. “If the landscape keeps changing, they won’t have any winter food.” She looks around at the short but sturdy birches. “If you look up historical photos, there are no trees here.”
Reindeer herding is one of the traditional livelihoods for Sámi families such as the Saras. The Sámi are an Indigenous people scattered thinly through a vast tract of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia’s Kola peninsula. Their presence long predates the Nordic settlers of these boreal lands, who now outnumber them. Their homeland is called Sápmi in the Sámi languages, nine of which survive, some clinging on to life with just a few hundred speakers.
For this year’s Venice Biennale, the Nordic Pavilion will be renamed the Sámi Pavilion, and a long colonised people, divided by borders and living at the sharp end of climate crisis, will take their place as a nation for the first time at the art world’s most prominent global gathering – a gathering that, because of its exhibitions presented in national pavilions, can feel like a kind of art Olympics, always entangled in the geopolitics of the moment.
What do reindeer on the tundra have to do with Máret Anne Sara’s art for the Venice Biennale? Everything. For her, reindeer are both the subject and the material of her work; indeed, they are central to life itself. For reindeer-herding families, the animals are not mere livestock. “There’s a different way of thinking and being between an Indigenous perspective and a typical western orientation,” she says. “For us, the reindeer is actually a very close relative. Humans, nature and animals are interdependent and equal. So destroying any part of this is like suicide from our perspective. What’s happening to the reindeer is our story as well.” The director of the Sámi Museum at Karasjok, Jelena Porsanger, had earlier told me how this proximity is even embedded in the northern Sámi language. “To live” – eallit – has the same derivation as the noun “herd” – eallu.
It is not a sentimental relationship, though. While I’m on the tundra, a couple of reindeer are quietly and efficiently slaughtered, “for domestic use”, says Sara; and at the herders’ hut, her brother Jovsset slices chunks of dried reindeer meat as a snack. Ande Somby, a Sámi activist, lawyer and artist whom I meet in the city of Alta a few days later, tells me that between the herder and the reindeer there is a kind of contract, “that the reindeer will be given a death of dignity and everything shall be used” – bones, hide, meat, antlers.
Somby is in his 60s, of the generation of Norwegian Sámi sent away to boarding school and chastised for speaking his mother tongue. Things are different now, with Sámi parliaments in the Nordic nations giving people a say in cultural, linguistic and educational matters. Somby is a yoiker: practitioner of a haunting, uncanny vocal technique in which the singer embodies, almost becomes, the subject of the yoik, which could be a person, a landscape, a wolf, or indeed a reindeer.
Some of Sara’s most powerful art has been made as a means of protest. For years, Jovsset Ante Sara was locked in a legal battle over the government’s policy of culling herds because – it was argued – of overgrazing. Sara denies that overgrazing is an issue, and anyway, she says, “it is very difficult for us to accept that argument, because the government is at the same time inviting big industries into the same area”.
A long history of mineral exploitation in Sápmi now also extends to building windfarms on traditional reindeer-herding lands, which spooks the reindeer and affects their traditional migratory patterns. It is complicated: clearly, now more than ever, wind energy is needed to help replace fossil fuels. But the Sámi, as so often, find themselves paying a high price for the high-carbon lifestyles of others.
As Jovsset’s case against the forcible slaughter of reindeer rose through the courts, Sara’s confrontational art accompanied it. She erected a pile of 200 bloodied, frozen reindeer heads with the Norwegian flag atop it near the courthouse in Tana. In front of the Norwegian parliament building in Oslo, she made a huge sculpture, a kind of “curtain” of 400 reindeer skulls, each with a bullet hole – a work that formed part of a greater project of documents, talks and debates she called Pile O’Sapmi.
Jovsset won every case until, at the last, he was defeated in the Supreme Court in 2017. “It showed how fragile we are, and how our rights are owned, totally, by the state,” says Sara. It was what happens, she says, “when an outside worldview criminalises your traditions and capitalises nature”. It is an irony, perhaps, that the new National Museum of Oslo has acquired that “curtain” of skulls and, when it opens its doors in June, this howl of protest against internal colonialism will be the first thing visitors see.
Sara tells me how, some time after the legal defeat when she was at a loss to find a way forward, she was talking to another herder, describing her disappointment and exhaustion. “All of a sudden he said, ‘But now the red calf is coming. And at the first sight of the red calf, everything is forgotten.’” It was a transformational moment. What he meant was that when the new reindeer are born – “the red calves” – they bring joy and a fresh beginning. Sara’s new work takes its cue from this sense of renewal but, like everything in her art, it is shot through with darkness. The losses of calves to legally protected predators such as wolverines and eagles are huge, and her work, which often teeters on the edge of the macabre, will use their mutilated bodies as material.
Pauliina Feodoroff is another artist representing Sápmi at the Venice Biennale who has a strong need to find hope in the dark. She is one of the 1,000 or so-strong Skolt Sámi community from close to the Finnish-Russian border, of whom around 300 speak the Skolt Sámi language. Feodoroff learned it in adulthood, “taking back” the tongue, like a number of her generation in their 30s and 40s. Many Skolt Sámi ancestral lands were long ago lost to the hellish, polluting nickel mines of Murmansk. But, says Feodoroff – whose background is in performance and choreography as well as politics and land guardianship – “for myself I want to focus on what is healthy and our need to be kind and gentle to ourselves and others”.
Feodoroff is speaking on the edge of the river Näätämö – or Njâuddam in Skolt Sami – north of Finland’s Lake Inari. She offers a greeting to the “grandmother” river and suggests that I introduce myself to the landscape by lying near the riverbank in the snow for a moment – which I do, staring into the heavy white sky and listening to the intense silence, broken only by the caw of a crow and the fussing of a couple of willow tits in the birches. The animistic, nature-based spirituality of the Sámi did not entirely die with the aggressive Christianising process of the 17th century, when Sámi noaidis, or shamans, were tried for witchcraft.
Later that day we cross the frozen lake Inari on sleds and enter the pristine, ancient pine forests that circle it – deep woods where the trees stand at a dignified, discreet distance from each other to take in as much of the precious Arctic light as possible. “This is our cultural monument,” says Feodoroff of the forest. “It is our cathedrals, our libraries, our museums.”
She has been fighting to preserve these forests, which are threatened by logging for the pulp industry, despite their antiquity, their biodiversity and their dark green, spreading beauty. Part of her work for Venice will be a conceptual project in which she will auction the right to see views of wilderness like this, and use the proceeds to buy and protect the land in a case of art and practical activism combining. When institutional or legal processes have ground to a halt, she says, “art is a space that can cause some kind of freedom of movement”.
In the forest we sit round a campfire and listen to Feodoroff’s friend, Anna Morottaja, one of the Inari Sámi, talking about her people’s traditional singing style the livđe, an art that had virtually disappeared from her community’s culture until she researched ethnomusicological collections in Berlin and elsewhere to find recordings of long-lost family members performing for the benefit of curious anthropologists. Like the yoik, the livđe can involve creating a kind of portrait of a person. Hearing an archive recording of her great-aunt’s livđe for the first time was, then, like a personal encounter. She sings it now, in the dusk and the snow, before the campfire, and it’s an unearthly thing with a rocking rhythm like a spell, but tinged with wit, telling of an energetic woman with “fire in her hemline”.
A song sung in the forest seems an enchanting and simple thing, but none of this really is simple. The Sámi were long victims of racism and prejudice. Northern Sámi activist and film-maker Siljá Somby later tells me that it’s still very much there. You can see plenty of hate speech directed at the Sámi on social media. The situation varies from country to country. Sweden has not signed the UN convention on Indigenous peoples, meaning the Swedish Sámi have fewer rights than those in Norway and Finland. For Venice, the Swedish side of Sápmi will be represented by painter Anders Sunna, another member of a reindeer-herding family that has been locked in legal battles for years with the state.
Even in Norway and Finland, points out Siljá Somby, the parliaments stop short of giving them what she calls “hard rights” over land or water, only “soft rights” over culture and education. And there are plenty of divisions within the Sámi community itself. Some have little time for the sharpening, over the last 50 years or so, of Sámi political consciousness, and those elected to the Norwegian Sámi parliament have included members of the Progress party, who would see the institution itself abolished. Nor has resistance come naturally to the Sámi, who for centuries adapted themselves to circumstances.
Inari Sámi reindeer herder Osmo Seurujärvi, has, like Morottaja, immersed himself in a language and way of life that his own parents were becoming estranged from, realising that if he did not, the chain would end and his children would lose the culture for ever. “We never resist, we always bend,” he says. “When it comes to nature, that’s the right thing to do. But when it comes to social structures, it’s not always the right thing. It’s always expected that Sámi will give up and not resist. We are not a warrior nation. But we do need to have a say.”
Everything is connected: this is what the Sámi tell us. The landscape, nature, the climate, politics, culture, society, the law, art – they are all entangled. Like Indigenous peoples from other parts of the world, the Sámi are at the front line of climate crisis but also the holders of knowledge; of alternative perspectives that could usefully challenge the consumerist, capitalist structures that have proved so destructive. And, as Feodoroff points out, we all rely on the Sámi and their breathtaking, expansive landscapes in more ways than we might at first think. “The forests here are storing carbon for you guys, too,” she says. “If they cease to exist, the consequences will come to your back door.”
• The Sámi Pavilion at the Venice Biennale opens on 23 April.
This article was amended to correct the spelling of Morottaja.
