Thinking with Peatlands - Reverberations
What is it about?
Andreas Kühne, Polina Medvedeva & Risten Anine Gaup, Brit Pavelson, Else Lagerspetz, Jaan Evart, Enn Kärmas & Villu Järmut, Marko Kohv from the Estonian Fund for Nature/University of Tartu, Geir Tore Holm, Ingrid Bjørnaali & Maria Simmons, Magnus Skei Holmen, Caitlin Franzmann, Nature & Youth Tromsø, RE-PEAT w/Jamie Walker, Randi Nygård, Søssa Jørgensen and Venice Agreement.
Throughout two group exhibitions and a symposium, artists, natural scientists, environmental activists and the public have lent the peatlands as a prism for exchange, learning and interaction. Together we have dived deep into the bog, listened, smelled, felt it and learnt from it.
In Thinking with Peatlands - Reverberations, reflections, sounds, learnings and understandings may dwell on, and inspire change in prevailing narratives about peatlands and mires.
The mire is the opposite of binary. It is liquid and solid, a collaborative ecosystem made up of minerals, nutrients, plants and so much more. A living memory medium, where visible and invisible stories are preserved - over thousands of years. A hybrid archive that is considered a portal between the worlds of the living and the non-living. As an archive, peatlands can tell us about centuries of known and unknown cultural histories locally as well as changes in the global climate.
Together with RE-PEAT, Tromsø Nature & Youth has started work on a counter-map of Rávdnjemuotki/Finnheia in which the mires and all its inhabitants, cultural and historical as well as plants and minerals, play the lead role. In the audiovisual installation Anarchiving Rávdnji by Andreas Kühne, Polina Medvedeva and Risten Anine Gaup, we follow forward traces in the same transforming landscape, entangling past, present and future. Thinking with Peatlands - Reverberations is a learning space for collective sharing, a scenography for an extensive mediation program for youth as well as a room where ongoing activist work and engagement of local and global peatland protection and health are cherished.
As part of the Thinking with Peatlands symposium program at the end of September, artists were invited to give responses from meetings or experiences with mires and peatlands. The projects presented as part of the Reverberations space, are works in process, poems and short texts displayed alongside works that have been commissioned as part of the Down in the Bog - Thinking with Peatlands project at large.
The book The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow - The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sámi by Elin Anna Labba, published in 2020, brought renewed attention to Tromsø's Sámi history. Rávdnjevággi, or Finnheia as it is called in Norwegian, is located on Sállir/Kvaløya and features prominently in the book as one of the places from which Sámi families were forcibly displaced after the reindeer grazing convention between the Norwegian and Swedish nation states was introduced in 1919. Reindeer herders who had previously moved with their reindeer through the seasons, for example between Rávdnjevággi and Gárasavvon (Karesuando), were, often without getting informed about it, forcibly displaced to what was for them unfamiliar places in Sweden, never to return to their summer homes along the coast of what from 1905 had become the state of Norway. Traces from the people who lived here are still visible in the landscape, and the symposium was also addressing learnings from the report ‘Kulturminneundersøkelser (Cultural heritage research) Rávdnjevággi’ which senior advisor at the Sámi Parliament Stine Benedicte Sveen wrote in collaboration with the abovementioned Elin Anna Labba in 2018. The area is still subject to conflicts of interest. Since the 1980s, plans for a ski resort and cabin village through the Arctic Center project have threatened local nature and peatland areas, reindeer herding, local residents and others who enjoy the area as it is.
Thinking with Peatlands is the third part of the project Down in the Bog - Thinking with Peatlands following the previous chapters Hibernation and Sporulation; two processual group exhibitions that have followed the seasons from a snowy Romsa/Tromsø in March to summer in Tallinn, Estonia, and back to autumn here in the north with the symposium Thinking with Peatlands, which now has its Reverberations at Romssa Dáiddasiida - Tromsø Kunstforening.
The project as a whole is curated by Karolin Tampere, the symposium and Reverberations in collaboration with Camilla Fagerli.
