Sápmi pod weneckim niebem
Sápmi under the Venetian Sky

Summary/Abstract: The article offers an analysis and interpretation of Sámi creative works presented within the national Sámi Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Arte 2022: The Milk of Dreams. Four works are examined in detail: the transmedia book Čatnosat, Máret Ánne Sara’s olfactory-sculptural installations Du-ššan-ahttanu-ššan and Ale suova sielu sáiget, and Pauliina Feodoroff’s performance Matriarchy. These projects both document Sápmi/Sámi everyday life and prefigure its possible, desirable transformations. They resist simplified interpretive frames of loss and ruin, and thus each of the works is interpreted as an affective refuge of radical hope in Jonathan Lear’s sense: a hope that sustains the possibility of life after the collapse of familiar worlds, reaching toward futures that cannot yet be fully articulated, seen nor understood.The analysis situates the Pavilion in dialogue with more-than-human studies and studies on traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), while also drawing on the work of Indigenous scholars such as Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate). Their insights underscore the importance of shifting from research “on” Indigenous peoples to research “with” them, acknowledging Indigenous ontoepistemologies as generative rather than supplementary. The analysis is thus conceived as an exercise in co-thinking rather than comparative critique. The Sámi Pavilion and the chosen Sámi works are read as sites where art, life, and environment are inseparable, and where radical hope plays a crucial affective role in believing in a potentially sovereign and livable Sámi future.

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