Pauliina Feodoroff | Sámi Pavilion (Nordic Countries), Venice Biennale 2022

Sámi artists Anders Sunna, Máret Ánne Sara and Pauliina Feodoroff have transformed the Nordic Pavilion to highlight the continuing struggle against colonialism, discrimination and land possession faced by Europe’s only Indigenous people

Pauliina Feodoroff’s multipronged work at Venice has a tangible goal: to raise awareness and money to protect as much old-growth forest as she can. For the past five years, Feodoroff has collaborated with land guardians to create a “forest peace plan” for lands decimated by commercial logging. With the aim of eventually buying back privatised land for the Sámi to manage and renew, the artist has created a series of images of these landscapes to be auctioned off, along with the rights to visit the land every five years. She calls these “landpersonscapes” in recognition of the Sámis’ inseparability from land that European colonisers long characterised as empty wilderness. “Buy our art, not our land,” is the message.

In addition to this fundraising element of the project, Feodoroff has choreographed a three-part performance titled Matriarchyaddressing issues around colonisation, Sámi notions of kinship with nature and matriarchal values of care and collectivity. The first part, titled Contact, enacts “the first proper greeting” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, demonstrating the Sámi tradition of gift-giving, which settlers misread for submission to domination. The second part, Auction, performs a sale of the landpersonscapes, and the final, jubilant segment, Matriarchy, celebrates the decolonisation of the female body and its communion with the land. “In our society everybody leads and nobody leads,” she said during a press trip to visit majestic old-growth forests flanking Lake Inari in northern Finland. “We don’t want to be governed and nature doesn’t want to be governed, it wants to be collaborated with.”

Giardini
27 September – 27 November 2022

Review and interviews by ELIZABETH FULLERTON
Filmed by ELIZABETH FULLERTON and MARTIN KENNEDY