Joar Nango
THE IMPROVISATION INTEGRAL TO LIFE IN THE CIRCUMPOLAR ARCTIC INSPIRES THE SÁMI ARTIST AND ARCHITECT’S EXPERIMENTAL SPACES
From a five-part collection of thick wool sweaters emblazoned with structures inspired by vernacular dwellings called lavvu to a series of images cataloguing upcycled everyday objects, Sámi artist and architect Joar Nango’s work traces the very edges of design and its interrelations with circumpolar Indigenous communities. Currently based in northern Norway — part of his people’s traditional territory, known as Sápmi, which stretches across three Nordic countries and a portion of Russia — Nango draws on the long traditions of hacking and improvisation integral to such regions, “where resources are scarce and the climate [is] unpredictable, harsh and unmerciful,” he says.
Nango’s Skievvar, devised for the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, is a case in point. Interpreting the traditional windows of nomadic, oceangoing Sámi groups into an “ancient-futurist” screen, the structure comprises dried and stretched halibut stomachs supported by a roughly hewn wooden scaffold and animated by digital projections. Nodding to a lineage of keen resourcefulness and material transformations, the window frames the unfolding dialogue between contemporary design and historic techniques at the core of Nango’s practice.
The peripatetic Sámi architectural library Girjegumpi, meanwhile, brings together various resources on Indigenous design collected by Nango over almost two decades within an ad hoc wooden structure inspired by gumpi, the nomadic self-made shelters used by reindeer herders. “The books and the library itself contain a lot of knowledge, of course,” says Nango of the now-digital catalogue, which ranges from colonial and ethnographic texts to contemporary theory. “But I’m very interested in creating some sort of social gathering space around these books.” In recent installations at the National Gallery of Canada and in Jokkmokk, Sweden, the sitespecific reading room was activated with demonstrations of traditional skills such as hide tanning. These skins were later employed to cover some of the more than 200 publications on view, relaying the manifold ways in which Indigenous knowledge and teachings are circulated while continuing to centre the role of space in exercising Sámi agency. “For me, as an artist and an architect, I think that working with space is a powerful tool,” he says. “I think that space in itself is a language.” _EVAN PAVKA