In the former industrial foundry Støperiet, snowmobile tracks are mounted from ceiling to floor. Swaying through the space like the northern lights, like paths, like oars, like bridges or barriers. Floating objects made of metal, leather, grass and twigs. What are we looking at? A potent starry sky, a bustling cosmos, or a universe out of its natural course?

- The scooter belts are a natural part of my external life, but on an almost unconscious inner level, they radically confront me. They were a foreign, ambiguous good for my grandparents, an attractive tool for my parents and for me a matter of course and prerequisite for being connected to the landscape, nature and animals. A link to my culture and cosmos, both material and immaterial, at the same time a powerful physical separation between me as a breathing, feeling and thinking human being in contact and dialogue with the living symbiosis I have been taught to understand living in, between the landscape, animals and surroundings.

 

The basic principle of Sami and indigenous philosophy about nature, life and the cosmos is that everything is interconnected and everything affects everything at all times. What is man in modern consciousness, and what are we in relation to nature and the cosmos? According to the Sami worldview, nature is not a collection of objects but rather a dynamic interaction of subjects in a natural democracy. What happens when development continuously and uncritically creates distance between our natural interior and relatable exterior, and between us as a species from the rest of the community of life? What is the significance and potential of this friction space for the global social context? Can a metaphysical dialogue between materials and the body, between the interior and the exterior from the Sami context, resonate with humanity's global challenges around our common prerequisites for life?

Máret Ánne Sara