Imagining the “Otherwises” of Indigenous Sámi Art

This chapter explores the decolonial dimensions of Sámi Dáiddamusea^x (2017) and “The Sámi Pavilion” (2022), two cross-cultural collaborative projects situated within the contemporary and transnational Sámi art world. Despite taking place within different geopolitical and institutional contexts the projects bear many similarities. For instance, both are collaborations between Sámi and non-Sámi actors and institutions, and both bring spaces for Sámi art into temporary existence, and they both refer to and emerge within a system that they seemingly seek to subvert. This chapter uses the analytical framework of decoloniality and “modernity/coloniality” that builds on border thinking and the possibility of “worlds and knowledges otherwise,” as Arturo Escobar has written, to argue that the two projects can be seen as material and onto-epistemological struggles towards imagining and performing the “otherwises” of Nordic coloniality through the appropriation of established institutions that are heavily grounded in the history of colonial heritage.