Contemporary media experiments in Sápmi, 2014-2023 

Rossella Ragazzi , The Arctic University Museum of Norway 

Sápmi – the transcultural and transnational homeland of the Sámi people – offers a vast array of examples of new media practices, due to early political awareness that art, activism, and cultural heritage were at the centre of formations of Indigenous identities, and an important cohesive aspect for the politics of rewriting one’s history. Videomaking (fiction, animation, documentary or experimental genres) is a powerful, accessible technology to express the multiple ontologies many artists and activists with Indigenous background wish to express in Sápmi (Norway, Sweden and Finland).  

Video and media interventions in Sápmi have a relational character, they circulate in festivals, galleries, universities, occupied spaces, museum installations, theatres and non-commercial venues. They are mostly produced in contexts of artistic research, experimentation, insurgence, celebration of Pan-indigeneity. Sápmi is still threatened by stigma and hate speech by non-Sámis, exploitation of reservoirs of natural resources by national States and extractivism by multinationals companies. Indigenous media take at heart these themes, as well as memory, language, craft and music.   

The talk will explore some of these media projects, in particular the open access video series by Joar Nango and Ken Are Bongo, “Post Capitalistic Architecture TV”, or the performance and video installations by Pauliina Feodoroff and Liselotte Wajstedt. These practices show free assemblage of genres often made possible because of collective production-models, within an ethical frame enacted and legislated by Sámi themselves.  

Interruptions: re-learning to teach visual anthropology

Isaac Marrero Guillamon, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona

This talk is based on my experience as teacher and convener of the MA in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, between 2015-2021 – a period of intense student-led anti-racist activism that facilitated a new ecology for teaching and learning. I will focus on two of the decolonial interventions my colleague Gabriel Dattatreyan and I experimented with: decentering the subdiscipline’s canon and unsettling its visual archive. These strategies represented an attempt to go beyond critique, and to engage with the classroom as a site where coloniality is also reproduced through the type of pedagogical encounters we create. By centering the experience of Black and ethnic minority students, affect and the senses emerged as sites of pedagogical intervention and possibility. 

The (im)possibility of decolonizing media anthropology: Reflections from a Southern positionality and praxis 

Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo, Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research, University of Bremen 

In recent years, the global North has witnessed an intensified call to decolonize anthropology and reimagine knowledge making more broadly. This "decolonial turn" has spurred a surge in scholars, events, and projects that claim to be decolonial. Yet, amid this growing interest, what does it truly mean to decolonize knowledge making—especially in the current climate of decolonial bandwagonism, on the one hand, and demonization of decoloniality, on the other? Moreover, what does it mean to take seriously, within the context of our institutions in the global North, the critical assertion by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang that "decolonization is not a metaphor"? I confront these questions through my experiences as a Southern anthropologist and curator based in Germany. I focus in particular on the challenges and insights from my involvement with the Affect and Colonialism Web Lab and my research on the ethical and political ontology of photographs of violence and resistance to reflect on the (im)possibility of decolonizing our practice as anthropologists and curators working on and with media.