Artist Joar Nango creates spaces for history to unravel
Architect and artist Joar Nango (b. 1979) sits in his studio in Tromsø, Norway, looking slightly tired. Having returned from work-related travels to Aotearoa, the Māori-language name for New Zealand with three other Sámi collaborators, namely, Eveliina Sarapää, Magnus Antaris Tuolja and Katarina Spik Skum, the artist has not been sleeping much of late. But the tiredness is also associated with a fatigue caused by the ongoing issue of the acknowledgement and work pushing for Sámi rights, language and culture.
Upon leaving Finland and the full house gathered at her presentation at Helsinki Design Week, Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, reminded Finns of the importance of the work at hand. The work which involves the importance and essential participation of the Sámi within the institutional and museum art context, in particular. Antonelli’s words echoed inside the walls of the old bank building, leaving a mark on the mind’s of many.
Yet, for some, this is old news. Something many of us should have realised long before.
“For someone like Antonelli to lend their voice is incredibly important since people have been ignoring these things for years,” Nango says. “It is a complicated manner in a sense of speaking about these issues–which I am doing–but also finding ways to make work that is able to actually implement change.”
According to the Nango, a sharp and possibly unpopular opinion is that the highly marginalised Sámi have very little power when it comes to politics, human rights and the right to decide for themselves. “It is great that someone from such a high position would say this, even though I have been vocalising this for the past twenty years.”
It helps to have someone come from New York and tell the larger audiences, since according to Nango, Scandinavian art institutions in particular, are experts within the art of ignorance. “Ignorance is a powerful tool in preventing change and from giving power to the Sámi movements. There is a silence of the majority.”
Nango has been exploring issues involving the role of Sámi and Indigenous architecture through site-specific interventions, design collaborations, photography, publications and video. His long-term project Girjegumpi: The Sámi Architecture Library was presented at the Nordic Countries Pavilion, in the 18th International Venice Architecture Exhibition in 2023.
Nurtured by parallel collaborations with other artists, architects, and craftspeople, Girjegumpi is a nomadic, collaborative library put together over the last fifteen years. It is a living, breathing and ever-evolving archive in the most vital sense. An expanding collection of more than 500 books embracing topics such as Sámi architecture and design, traditional and ancestral building knowledge, activism, and decoloniality. The archive also includes artworks, films, tools, reused materials, and more.
“Words like that, majoritetens tystnad, the silence of the majority, is interesting because there are so many systems built on that way of rejecting change and maintaining power from the colonisers perspective. There are the internalised structures around the way we think, our ethical right to exist, white privilege and the lack of wanting to deal with past narratives. In order to understand how things are, we need to be able to acknowledge the way things have been before. To me, we need to understand the way the Sámi people have been suffering and to share that conversation. Even though I, as a Sámi myself, hate to be having that dialogue.”
“Maybe that is why I make collective work? To share some of the responsibility.”
“Maybe that is why I make collective work? To share some of the responsibility.”
The library format used in Girjegumpi, is a way of taking a concept back to the roots. A personalised collection of text and video, something Nango has been growing for years. Being a hoarder, the artist has been collecting things, always bringing empty suitcases to travels to return home with precious items. A process invented by the Greeks as a way of creating spaces where meetings and important discussions could take place. Girjegumpi is an archive, sure, but above all, a site for dialogue to arise.
Every time it travels, a symposium originates–and some are recorded.
Post-Capitalist Architecture TV is a recent work by Nango and Ken Are Bongo. A series of six conversational films now being presented at the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design or ArkDes. In the series, the pair travel through Arctic landscapes as they explore architecture at the scale of building techniques to the intangible power relationships that govern the land today. Among other themes, PCA-TV is an ongoing study of architecture after capitalism. Guests range from researchers and craftspeople to artists and activists.
Originally built for Girjegumpi, the work addresses the relevance of Indigenous culture in architectural discourse and construction today. Expressing the importance of collaborative work, building techniques and use of resources in the rapidly changing climate conditions, PCA-TV is a more cinematic part of the archive.
“Ken Are Bongo is my cousin, the series is just us discussing things,” the artist humbly claims but goes on to explain, “for me there is a need for creating work that is autonomous to bring something new. Something that can not be forgotten or taken over again.”
To Nango, being Sámi is often being swallowed by or taken over by large, existing conversations. When it comes to the archive, the artist identifies as the force driving the size, its growth and the mediums but more than anything, it is a collective and open platform which allows for opinions and expressions to unfold. So much so that the archive that started as a Sámi architecture library, is slowly becoming a trans-indigenous architecture project. “Girjegumpi is an important way of building political agency in the indigenous world. The Sámi working with Māori for example.”
It is also a work that is spread on many mediums?
“Well, I am a man living in the current times in 2024–it would be weird not to use ways that are a part of our literary world. Books have transcended to becoming something more ephemeral and there is nothing new about that.”
The artist is careful to note that a lot of the indigenous culture is not, and has not been, written but is rather a land-based practice. A laboratory setting will then find an aesthetical way of highlighting that. “In New Zealand, we ended up making chairs.”
There is a flexible type of concept to how the space of the Girjegumpi archive will look. The project is built more around participation and creating a nice, collaborative energy. “Architects often have a challenge of letting go of their aesthetic control. I want to allow for more elasticity and individual ownership.”
Additionally, many historians have misinterpreted Sámi architecture, looking into the recipes and ways of working rather than understanding the relation of the practice to the landscape. According to Nango, “to Sámi, building is more of an attitude of being in the world rather than connecting pieces of timber”.
”To Sámi, building is more of an attitude of being in the world rather than connecting pieces of timber.”
There is, in fact, a staccato way of thinking what architecture is.
“My work is very political and an attempt to position itself as systemic and political critique. I am however fatigued and tired of the polarized conversations surrounding Sámi rights and expressions. I am therefore, using architecture and spatial, social languages to create an alternative to that.”
A third space of sorts, a more inviting one where also representatives of the majority are allowed to take part.
“It is a space beyond the us-versus-them mentality.”
Work driven by a societal urgency to deal with human rights’ related issues collectively. Sámi rights are only one of many such battles, the artist reminds us.
“But it is one of the oldest continuing tales of oppression that exists here in Northern Europe.”
The third space, therefore, becomes an important place for the colonial narrative of Scandinavian history to unravel.
Post-Capitalist Architecture TV (PCA-TV) by Joar Nango and Ken Are Bongo, ArkDes is on until 3 May 2026. More details can be found here. Weekly’s interview with Paola Antonelli can be found here.