Convened by Lisa Nyberg, UmArts Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Fine Art.
This inter-disciplinary panel focuses on the challenges of placemaking on land impacted by settler-colonialism. Common for several indigenous cultures is a relationship to land based on principles of reciprocity, where giving and taking is a mutually beneficial practice. This challenges many Western cultures tendency to mainly consider land from a utilitarian perspective, prioritizing extraction for shorter economic gains over more long-lasting values like connection, co-habitation and co-existence. How can we re-think our relationship to land through the practice of art, design and architecture?
Centering indigenous research, the aim of the panel is to examine the intricacies of placemaking based on principles of relationality and reciprocity. How do we create sustainable relations to land and people in our place-making? How do we “host on hostile lands”, taking into consideration ongoing conflicts over land rights? How do we document land-based practices without offering up indigenous knowledge for extraction?
Transgressing the limitations of the two-hour panel-session format, as well as the campus architecture, the group will host a space in the form of a tentipi on the riverbank.
Geir Tore Holm (Artist), Katarina Pirak Sikku (Artist), Marit-Shirin Carolasdotter (Choreographer & Dancer), Sandi Hilal (Architect & Researcher).
Lisa Nyberg (UmArts).
Geir Tore Holm (b. Tromsø, 1966), comes from Olmmáivággi/Manndalen, Troms. Since 2010 he is a farmer at Øvre Ringstad in Skiptvet, Østfold. Parallel to his work with video, photography, sculpture, performance and installations, Geir Tore Holm mediates, writes and teaches contemporary art. Since initiating Balkong in 1993, with the home as art space, the contexts of artistic practice and work with dialogue, as well as ecology, the concerns of indigenous peoples, farming and social engagement is central. In 2003 he initiated the infinite Sørfinnset skole/ the nord land in Gildeskål, Nordland together with his partner Søssa Jørgensen. He is a participant in Ensayos, a collective research project rooted in the natural park Karukinka in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Geir Tore Holm was the head of establishing the Academy of Contemporary Art and Creative Writing, University of Tromsø in 2007 and did his PhD at Oslo National Academy of the Arts with the artistic research project Poetics for Changing Aesthetics. He is a holder of the National Grant for artists and receiver of the John Savio Prize 2015.
Katarina Pirak Sikku is an artist and lives in Jåhkåmåhkke, Sápmi. Her research project ”Bortom tankehimlens mentala sorgerand – studier av mental egenmakt” (founded by VR) examines the grief experienced as a consequence of settler colonialism, by artistic research methods that aims to regain her power to define, name and “write herself into the landscape”.
Marit-Shirin Carolasdotter is a dance maker with her base in Umeå/Ubmeje, Sápmi. She has a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from Stockholm University of the Arts and has worked professionally as a dancer in Belgium, Austria, Japan, Germany, Greece, Denmark, and Iceland since 2015. Through her research, practice, and international collaborations on her long-term project, Humans & Soil, Shirin has immersed herself in our relationship to the earth we walk on and decolonial relationships between Indigenous peoples and performing arts.
Sandi Hilal is a Palestinian architect and researcher, a visiting professor at Lund University and co-founder of DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research). The architectural collective combines multiple disciplines such as architecture, art, urbanism politics and pedagogy to create conceptual speculations, spatial interventions, discourses and collective learning. Hilal was part of the research project “Moving North” that critically explored how different placemaking processes can promote social participation and social sustainability in northern Sweden.
This panel is funded by Umeå Transformation Research Initiative (UTRI).
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