SON[I]A #402
Eva Maria Fjellheim
Eva Maria Fjellheim is a southern Saami researcher at the Arctic University of Norway. Her research focuses on indigenous peoples’ rights, with an emphasis on the study of “green colonialism”: a land-grabbing strategy legitimized by hegemonic climate change policies that perpetuate relations of domination and coloniality.
Drawing on her knowledge of the disputes and movements of Latin American indigenous peoples and on the five-generation struggle in the Sápmi region, Eva Maria concentrates on the case of Fosen in Norway: reindeer-herding lands that are vital to the Saami people and integral to their migratory routes, their culture, their way of life and their relationship with nature. These lands are being targeted by extractive projects driven by corporate and government interests, and are in the process of being turned into wind energy plants. Eva Maria has been accompanying the legal action in the Fosen case, which pits a community of reindeer herders against a wind energy company and the Norwegian government. In view of the asymmetrical nature of the dialogue in the court cases, Fjellheim explores the epistemic conflict through which corporate science silences voices and forms of knowledge contrary to colonial, capitalist and extractivist interests.
In this podcast, Eva Maria takes a close, personal experience—a photograph of her great-grandmother from her family album—as a point of departure to unpack the racist and colonial logics that gave rise to the stigma attached to Saami identity, and the prejudices that remain latent today. We talk about epistemicide, strategic ignorance and green colonialism, about ancestral practices that outlast us, and about the territory as a body. And we see how age-old Saami defiance and resilience can still use imaginative tactics to resist and reject the slow violence of a silent and silenced piecemeal dispossession.
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED. Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0 Internacional
Elvira Espejo Ayca
Elvira Espejo Ayca is an indigenous artist, weaver, writer, poet and researcher. Her work brings to light collective strategies that resist monoculturalization, moving back and forth between the rural and urban, between ancestral practices and the colonial gaze, between the sentipensamiento (feeling-thinking) of indigenous peoples and the predominance of academic Eurocentrism. In this podcast, we take a deep dive into the actions of the National Museum of Etnography and Folklore (MUSEF) of La Paz (Bolivia) in search of mutual understanding and respect, while weaving and reweaving the historical gaps and bridges between two worlds.
Kristin Ross
Kristin Ross reflects on the power of subjectivity in addressing history, and on oral memory and first-person accounts. She examines the subversive potential of today’s environmental struggles as forms of activism capable of generating a new ecological, social, and political intelligence, and she recaptures the associative and cooperative spirit of the Paris Commune, explores the needs to move beyond official national fictions, and defends solidarity as a political strategy.
Marwa Arsanios
In this podcast, Lebanese artist, researcher, and filmmaker Marwa Arsanios unpacks the many conversational tactics embedded in her modes of working in the gaps between art and activism, in the intersection between ecological thinking, land struggles, and feminist politics. We talk about reading groups, the film object, solidarity as a practice, and using the art economy to bring communities and movements together.