Indeed, Sápmi may be one of the most beautiful places on earth: its glaciers and forests and the Aurora Borealis inspired Phillip Pullman’s ‘Northern Lights’ trilogy and Elsa’s kingdom in Frozen – but it is on the front line of the climate crisis. The project that Feodoroff will bring to Venice underlines this. A theatre director and former president of the pan-Nordic Sámi Council as well as an artist, she has partnered with the organisation Snowchange to auction lost and threatened indigenous Sámi lands, in exchange for the right to own the view of that land, and visit it every five years.
The part of Sápmi that she comes from, near Lake Inari in Finland, has been devastated by industrial deforestation and the ensuing collapse of the ecosystem. It is a land of wind-sculpted snowdrifts and silence, dense with the kind of forest in which every fairy tale you ever read was set. When we visit in the late afternoon, sun is slicing through the pines, spilling liquid light on the floor ahead. The lake is frozen solid. ‘But in the autumn,’ says local Anna Morottaja, one of Feodoroff’s collaborators, ‘when I go out in my boat, and the water is so still that it reflects the shining stars, I think, so few people in the world have seen or felt this.’
In the pavilion, Feodoroff will present photographs in this vein, of landscapes under threat, together with a performed ‘auction’ that sets the stage for a real one to be conducted later this year by an international auction house. The plots range between 70 and 1,000 hectares, and will cost from €20,000 to €1.5 million; buyers will enter a long-term protective relationship with that land, and with its Sámi guardians.
‘Here in Sápmi, everything comes back to the land,’ says Keskitalo. ‘The land and the artists and the politics – it’s part of the same story, and the art has been a way of explaining to the majority what we are about, but also to ourselves, who we are and why we are struggling.’
Throughout her tenure, Keskitalo oversaw the building of a significant collection of contemporary Sámi art. Some is on display in the parliament building in Karasjok (Kárášjohka in Sámi), a larch-clad structure built in 2005 following an architecture competition sponsored by the Norwegian government. It is ravishingly beautiful, with hundreds of bulbs strung from the ceiling to resemble the night sky, and windows that glow green from the pines climbing the hillside.
Most of the art collection, though, which has been vital in fuelling the new market for Sámi art, is languishing in storage at the Riddo Duottar Museum nearby. It’s a controversial situation because the Sámi are waiting on the Norwegian government to finally build a dedicated Sámi art museum, which has been in the planning stages for three decades. When she gives me a tour, Riddo Duottar director Jelena Porsanger is wearing a T-shirt printed with still no sami daidda museum (dáidda meaning art). ‘I hope there will be some steps forward before I retire,’ she says. ‘So many other directors and leaders and politicians involved in our campaign have already gone, without success. Norway can afford it, it’s just a question of priority.’
‘The biggest problem for us,’ says Feodoroff, ‘has always been that there have been no negotiations, no hearings at all. We are like small children or animals or plants. We don’t have a say, even though the families of people living here on this land have a relationship with that land that lasts for millennia.’
Venice, then, may be the opportunity of a generation. ‘Imagine that we have to go to Venice to get Oslo to listen,’ says Keskitalo. ‘I’ve been a politician for many years, and trying to explain our different perspective on the world, it’s really tiring. But when I look at the art of Anders Sunna or Máret Anne Sara, or Pauliina Feodoroff, I see that my words can only reach so far. It is art that will open the minds and the eyes and the hearts of those who need to understand and listen.’
