International Day of the World’s Indigenous People
International Day of the World’s Indigenous People is celebrated today in recognition of the rights of the world’s indigenous populations which are often threatened. We’ve been thinking about the theme for this year around indigenous women in the preservation and transmission of traditional knowledge. This brought the work of our collaborators Jenni Laiti and Outi Pieski to mind.
Today we introduce and celebrate our collaborators, Jenni Laiti and Outi Pieski.
Meet Jenni Laiti
Jenni Laiti is a Sámi artivist, duojár (traditional Sámi craft maker), indigenous rights activist and climate justice advocate. She is a link in the thousand years chain of the craftmanship of Sámi duodji (traditional crafts) and the Arctic Indigenous survival. Laiti is dedicating her work to craft, create, protect, defend, resurgence and regenerate this world as everyone else before her. Indigenous futurism, aspiration to justice not only for ourselves, but justice for all creation and the love for her land guide her. Laiti has been active in the Sámi civil society since she was 16 years. In recent years she has been active in the resistance movement against a planned mining project in Kallak / Gállok in her home village, advocating climate justice in Sápmi and working with local Sámi communities to strengthen Sámi self-determination and local governance. The vision to live as a free people one day carries forward. As an LBE collaborator she is artistically investigating the end of the Arctic in Sápmi, the indigenous territory of the Sámi people.
“The Indigenous Sámi people is an Arctic people. Our survival depends on the cold, ice and winter. We are nothing without the winter, we are nothing without the snow, we are nothing without the ice. Up here, we have a temperature increase of more than double the global average. This causes the collapse of our Arctic environment and ecosystems. We are in a crisis where our world is vanishing in front of our eyes and melting into water.”
Meet Outi Pieski
Outi Pieski (b. 1973) is a Sámi visual artist based in Ohcejohka (Utsjoki), Finnish side of Sápmi. Her paintings and installations remain in dialogue with the Arctic region and commit to give form to how the interdependence of nature and culture has shaped life practices of the indigenous Sámi community. Her work combines craft traditions as somatic and familial vocabularies called duodji. Pieski opens intergenerational dialogues around knowledge of the handmade as a feminist articulation — toward a transfer of consciousness avowing the Sámi principle of ‘agreeable life’ (soabalaš eallin) and an act against forgetting.
In her work, Pieski often engages in interdisciplinary dialogue with researchers, musicians, craftspeople and choreographers. Since graduating from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (2000), Pieski has exhibited internationally for over two decades, most recently at the Venice Biennale (2019); the Gwangju Biennale (2021); the Helsinki Biennial (2021), the Biennale of Sydney (2022) and Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2022). Pieski has received several awards, including the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts Award (2017), and the Finnish Cultural Foundation’s Grand Prize for the promotion of outstanding cultural endeavours (2020).
As part of the Land Body Ecologies project, this collaboration looks at developing artistic inventions in the land titled “Dálvadas, the Winter Village”. The team has been listening and visiting the land together and these traditional Sámi walking sticks are guiding their work as part of an ongoing practice.
Below we share some of the artists’ work ongoing in response:
Reading List:
- Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
- Follow @jennilaiti and @outipieski on Instagram for more details.
- Read more:
https://wagingnonviolence.org/rs/2022/05/indigenous-sami-people-gallok-mine-false-climate-solutions/
