The cosmopolitical of Indigenous Artistic intervention

• In Event: Doing Cosmopolitics: Exploring Everyday Potentials Within STS Research

Abstract

In Sápmi, Sámi artists are taking the lead in environmental controversies regarding governance of reindeer herding, land and waters. Ontological disagreement are enacted through Art-Science-Political mobilizing projects like ”Pile of Sápmi” and “There is no Postcolonial” challenging governmental politics regarding Sámi interests. In December 2017 the Sámi artist Máret Anna Sára and the Norwegian artist A K Dolven, did several artistic interventions in front of the Norwegian Parliament while Máret’s brother, Jovsset Ánte Sára sat in the Supreme Court. He was challenging the Norwegian states legitimacy to govern the size of his reindeer herd, as well as who and how nature best can be conserved. This are sparking a new political movement that challenge the foundation of both the modern state and the regional governmental body Finnmarkseiendommen by confronting the binaries embedded in its legal and political entities and modes of knowing. The division of Nature – Culture, Politics – Art but also Indigenous - Not collapse through these new mobilization against injustice. In this paper, I will take these chains of events as well as the way I have learned to know and live with the multiple earth-beings of Sápmi, as the ethnography from where to investigate the awareness that cosmopolitics offer the academic as well as political communities.

Author

• Britt Kramvig, University of Tromsø