July 2, 2025

Hello Olof,

I am excited about your exhibition To carry this body of an animal forth at 1646 and to enter this conversation with you! I have so many questions, but before I start I think it is only fair to tell you a bit of what guides my curiosity about your artistic practice, creative process, and what folklorist Elena Sottilotta calls “artivism.” 

The information about the exhibition indicates that you draw on your Sámi heritage as well as popular culture and mythic stories to create work that “confronts social injustices and transforms a forgotten past into a living present.” This description immediately draws me in because I am a settler of colour in Hawai’i who – in seeking to be an ally of native Hawaiians in their pursuit of sovereignty, be it esthetic, intellectual, or political – has been most impressed with how indigenous traditions persist and adapt despite racist and oppressive designs to obliterate them. And traditional narratives – wonder tales in particular – have been a deep interest of mine in different media, across cultures, and especially in their contemporary revisions and remixes. I feel profoundly ignorant approaching you and your work, and at the same time connected and eager to appreciate and learn. Enough of me now, but I hope this gives you some sense of how your exhibition inspires and intrigues me. 

Let me offer two starting points for our discussion, then. 

One concerns the materials that you mold, combine, transform in your sculptures and installations. Do you choose them, or do they find you? Could you provide an example of how specific materials help to bring Sámi knowledge and sensitivities into the present as a living culture? How do you want us experiencing your work to relate to its materiality?

The other is that I have been thinking a lot about your title for the exhibition. How did it come to you? Was it a spark for your creations or an arrival? 

Can you say more about the significance of the word forth? In English it powerfully points to movement in both space and time, and to me it suggests looking ahead to the future with energy and even hope. I am also struck by how this body of an animal immediately calls forth a sense of relationship, but that relationship is quite fraught nowadays….

I hope you find these questions inviting. Wherever they take you, I will be grateful for your thoughts.

Cristina, but I prefer Cri

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July 6, 2025

Hej Cri, 

I am writing an answer but it takes a bit of thought. Hopefully you will have it tomorrow evening.

Best, 

Olof

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July 6, 2025

Of course, Olof. No worries. 

Cri

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July 8, 2025

Hej Cri,

Thank you for your letter and for sharing your thoughts. 

It is lovely to have this opportunity to get in touch with someone new from a different context to talk about my practice. I am really excited to see where we will end up at the end of this conversation.

Before I dive into the questions you asked, it feels appropriate to give a bit of background on the overarching thoughts and issues I work with both as an artist and as a person in general. I have a Sámi mother and a Swedish father. I have always had the feeling of standing between two worlds. It might sound baroque, but during the 90s and early 2000s – my formative years – the idea of “full-blooded” and “half-blooded” identities was very much alive, something that haunted me back then and, to some degree, still does today. The question of the “purity” of blood came from all directions. And the answer I would give always felt wrong.

But before I even began to understand what I have just written, my family and I moved from Gällivare – a small mining town and municipality north of the Arctic Circle – to Luleå, a medium-sized Swedish city just south of the Arctic Circle, when I was six years old. In Gällivare, there are more Sámi people, and my brother and I attended Sámi preschool and Sámi primary school. We received the native language instruction we were entitled to. But in Luleå, it was up to my mother to handle that. A task she did not have in her. Like many of her generation, she felt ashamed of her mother tongue due to the Nomad School system. The Nomad School was a boarding school for the children of reindeer herding Sámi that provided an inferior education compared to the standard Swedish school and prohibited children from speaking Sámi. When we moved, I was at the age where I had not become fully aware yet of the inner and outer worlds. By that, I mean that I did not perceive any difference between my family’s norms and those of society. But gradually, I began to understand that the Sámi represented something “different”, something exotic in the eyes of many in the majority society. With that came the sense of a demand to live up to that exotic image they had.

This is becoming a bit longer than I was thinking. But what is it that I want to say? Yes, it is that I have struggled with a sense of shame tied to my identity, a feeling of not belonging anywhere, and the sense that I must choose one or the other. The easiest path would have been to simply “become” Swedish. In making that choice, allow the legacy of race biology, the ideology of Western cultural supremacy, and colonial power structures to win. But despite the inherited shame, the “impure” blood, the lost language, the colonial wounds and scars – that choice never truly existed. And the choice to “become” only Sámi has felt just as alien. It has seemed one-dimensional and, in the end, would have meant accepting the exoticising gaze. So I have remained in the borderland, in the in-between space. By choice, but also because there has never been any other choice really. Perhaps it was through encountering the work of Jimmie Durham, and I am aware of the criticism directed at him and his artistic practice; I understand the issues, but that is a discussion for another time. I began to understand how, through art, I could begin to reimagine the borderland as a landscape worth exploring.

Okay, so back to the questions that I really enjoyed. First of all, it all starts with the material, the tactility and to explore an idea with the hands. I am that type of person that cannot think without being in motion and letting the hands work. In that process I often find myself surrounded by figures and sculptures that are very much alive and talking about each other. In that sense, I always thought that the work finds me and not the other way around. When it comes to the material themselves, I never really thought about how they made their way into my studio and my hands. Some have been around always, like a piece of wood that I carved with a knife as a kid. Others have just found their way into my practice without me ever thinking about it, for example glass happened to become something that I work with. Before I started to work with glass it felt like a material that was too seductive with all its shine and gloss. But since it made its way into my practice, it really elevated my work and gave it something that my practice lacked. In that sense, the way I choose the materials has to be open, non-judgmental and affirmative. The whole process in the studio is a collaboration between me, the materials, the forms, figures and tools that exist in there. No one stands above the other. For me, that collaborative process is about juxtaposing the materials, my thoughts and ideas connected to what I wrote in the beginning. It has to be playful. 

Regarding the second part of your question about materials and if there is any material that talks about the present living culture of Sámi people, I think it is a bit hard to answer. My way of thinking about that issue has been to mishmash materials. My family has been reindeer herders for generations. The material of the reindeer is and has always been important. So I tend to work with that. Herding is very much alive still. I assemble it with something that belongs to the urban or even the industrial environment. That is a way of trying to move out of the cliche, one-dimensional image of Sámi people, or natives in general. I do not know if that really answers your question.

About the title: it is quite simple actually. It comes from the epos Ædnan from poet and fellow Sámi Linnea Axelsson. It follows a family from the 1800s to the late 1900s. The sentence comes from there, originally in Swedish. In the context of the book, the sentence is talking about the reality that everything that the voice of the book wears at that moment, is made of the body of the reindeer. The skin and fur are the clothes, the tendons have become a sinew thread that holds the clothes together. So it definitely speaks of a close connection of living with the animal that the majority in the world no longer shares. For me personally, it has been an animal that existed almost like a living ghost that I have sometimes been really close to. Anyhow, when I read the sentence I thought of the metaphorical weight that the reindeer has on me, or the Sámi culture in general. On the one hand, it is the central aspect of the culture. It is the life of the culture. But on the other hand, it is something that one never can escape. Does that make sense? In addition, the title talks about how we ourselves carry forth the body of an animal everyday. 

When translating the sentence to English I played with a few different words but got stuck by forth. It felt to me that it had more weight than “forward”. I like how you gave it even more depth. I think all my endeavours as an artist are about trying to find ways of thinking about the future in a positive way. How to deal with the history of oppression without becoming stuck in that past? 

I just realised that I wrote things about “pure blood”, and that those words, or the ideas that they are connected to, are nothing that I stand behind. But it creates an understanding of some of the issues that I work with. 

Best, 

Olof

P.S. I had to write the first part of the email in Swedish, because it was too complicated to write in English. A bit lazy of me, but then I translated it through OpenAI. I guess it gives the text a different tone than the part when I answer your questions. But it is what it is.

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July 12, 2025

Just letting you know, Olof, that I will respond tomorrow. Have been helping my daughter and her family move into a new place and taking care of my granddaughter who is almost 5 in the chaos of the move 😉

Cri

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July 14, 2025

No worries! 100% relate. Moved last year with my 5 year old and 6 month baby 😀

We have still not quite settled in the new apartment.

Olof

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July 14, 2025

🌺🐸🌺🐸

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July 17, 2025

A bit later than I had hoped for…

First of all, thank you, Olof, for sharing not only information about your Sámi and Swedish heritage, but your feelings about being of mixed ancestry, and how these feelings have changed in the course of your life. I come from a mix too, Anglo-Indian and Italian, and growing up in Italy (I was born in 1955) as a brown girl felt quite different as there were not, as there are now, Indian or South Asian communities. I was not just mixed, I was mixed up, but I gather my situation was quite different from yours as there is nothing native or indigenous about me: my problems are also linked to colonialism, racism, imperialism, but I have no genealogical connections to land or people with a long history to connect with. 

I think that, like me, many will relate to what you shared but also recognise how your experience – which informs your art – has its own materiality, history, and place. I really appreciate what you say about choosing to stay in-between, even if that does not always feels like a choice, because to me that in-between is full of possibilities. Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl (playwright and author of Hawaiian-Samoan-European ancestry) talks about “writing in the vā”, a spiritual realm of relation, as tending to the recognition that “many of Pacific Island ancestry (…) are continually aware of the people and events that have gone before us and the intermingling of past and present,” dream and reality, memory and hope. Does the in-between as a realm of relation resonate with you as an artist? 

I am also impressed with how you talk about assembling materials from Sámi reindeer herding traditions and the Swedish urban milieu as a strategy to counter stereotypes. I take it that the assemblage makes a statement about present-day Sámi ways of life because, as you said, “herding is still very much alive” and it competes, clashes, coexists with industrial herding of people. In a way, your juxtapositions make the reindeer herding visible and also signal how in the present, and in your art, there are multiple ways of seeing, being in the world, and acting upon it. Am I understanding what you said? 

Moving forth, let me ask you about a different assemblage that is active in your sculptures and installations: that of fragments from Sámi culture and from popular culture. Why popular culture? And, by presenting these mishmashes, what kind of reactions are you hoping for on the part of viewers of the exhibition? I am not sure that thinking of those who experience your work is part of your artistic process, but one way or another I am interested in knowing.

That you used OpenAI to translate a part of your message from Swedish and wrote another part in English seems quite appropriate to me as the two strategies and their juxtaposition form another assemblage of sorts; and if the tone is different that can signal how this communication is the product of a lot of labour and artifice in the sense that we are working with different languages (and then our exchange will also be translated!), at the same time that we strive to make our conversation as clear and fluid as possible. And of course, when talking about your process, you are also translating from the language of materiality and the language of imagery to that of words. Is there a moment that you recall when you decided to work with sculpture as your expressive language?

Finally, I am so glad I asked about the title of the exhibition as there is a clear and significant source or resource for it. I want to hear more about carrying forth the body of an animal is staged in your work, but I do not want to pile too many questions together at once. 

Thank you for reading and responding,

Cri

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July 31, 2025

Hej Cri,

I have been tenting for ten days with my family and had to enjoy the pace of outdoor living. Therefore the delay in my answer, but now I am back.

What you write resonates with me and I must say that it feels good that we share the experience. The quote of Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl was spot on. And yes, I think of it as a “realm of relations” where the “intermingling of the past and the present” is at hand. Through that, I try to connect to death and to life, and bridge the quietness and emptiness of not fully knowing the history of my people. I have come to see the in-between as a space of possibilities. An area where I can play with expectations, history and mythmaking, both connected and not connected to the conditions of having mixed ancestry, to hopefully explore new relationships and look for alternative paths of how the past and the present intermingle. Furthermore, like I wrote in the last email, I came to a point where choosing either felt stupid or felt like lying. In admitting (submitting?) to the in-between, I am finding a way to be honest and see how those personal, private, regional experiences exist elsewhere too. 

Regarding the juxtaposition of traditional and non-traditional materials, you are quite right. There are conflicts in Samí people connected to reindeer herding where non-Samí people attack reindeers, kill them and butcher them illegally, chase and run over them with their snowmobiles, and slander Samí people. There is this idea that reindeer herders receive big subsidies from the state which means that they do not have to work with anything else. Then, there are conflicts in the whole country about mining projects, windmill parks, hydroelectric plants and forest industry where big parts of Samí are supposed to create the green transition. Samí people, reindeer herders, that oppose new mines are considered conservative, greedy for land and egocentric. But from my perspective it comes down to that the traditional life in Samí is not submitting to the capitalist system. Reindeer herders do not get rich, in the capitalistic way, by working. However, through my juxtaposition I try to counter the one-dimensional view of the indigenous and position ourselves as everybody else who is just trying to find their way in contemporary life full of contradictions. 

The easy answer to why I chose to incorporate popular culture to my work is because I have, ever since a kid, been mesmerised by cartoons, computer games and pop music. Maybe it is because I was born in the late 80s and that Sweden has been very influenced by North America, the USA in particular, which has created a heavy aesthetical impact on me. Another answer is that through the pop cultural elements, I want to create different layers of entrance into my sculptures. There might be something familiar for people to latch on to. A third one is that it comes back to not having to choose either or. We are multifaceted and I think most of us move in and out of different aesthetical environments today. We consciously and unconsciously value things as “better” and “worse”. Speaking from my point of view, they all affect me and my life. So, I assemble what is in front of me, what lays on my desk so to speak, without trying to rank it. For example, as a dad of two, I am among children’s toys and children’s books. I would say that is the most popular cultural expression of my life right now. Art is about life, so references from that environment seep into my practice whether I want them or not. But to answer what I want the viewer to experience, I think it is a method for me to say that these things exist together at the same time. It is an invitation to the in-between realm of mine that is filled with creatures, beings, seers, and geists with their own agencies. 

I love how you managed to turn the fact that I have used AI to translate the text to something interesting. It felt a bit shameful to do but at the same time I had to and had to recognise it. Language has always been something that I found hard to work with. Words have such a definite feeling for me. In that sense, they are a bit scary and I am afraid that they would haunt me if they are misused. So, working with my hands as a means of expression has always been closer. It is a more intuitive way of working where I can try things out. A few years ago, I listened to a recorded artist talk by the artist Phyllida Barlow, and she was asked if she knew what her sculptures were before she started working on them. She answered something like: “I make work to be able to think,” and that she was thinking out the whole process. When I heard it – she phrased it better though – I felt a close connection to her thinking. Written words have the opposite feeling for me. I cannot think through the text, it must be finished before I start. Rationally, I know this is not true but I cannot escape. For this exhibition, I have started to work on a little word/sound experiment where the language and the voice are central. I never got to learn Samí language as a kid, since my mom, as I wrote, did not have it in her to pass it on to my brother and me. For her, it was to protect us. But I assembled a few different ideas into one piece in which the voice, the wind, the language and the breath as the bearer of life are expressed through horn-like sculptures. I wrote a short poem that my mother, my daughter and me read together in Northern Samí language: 

Say after me my beloved mother
In my voice dwells the spirit of the language that got stolen but never died

Say after me my beloved son
In my voice dwells the spirit of the language that never saw the light but that is burning in the chest

Say after me my beloved granddaughter
In my voice dwells the spirit of the language that bubbles of joy but stumbles over the tongue

Now let us sing a song for the wind, the language and the voice 

Maybe I solved the issue I have with text by working towards a language that has more to do with my heart than my mind. If that makes sense?

I am glad you asked about the title! Maybe we could get deeper into that in our next emails.

Best,

Olof 

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August 5, 2025

These are such rich answers, Olof. Thank you. And I love the poem. In what language will it be at the exhibition and will it be translated there too? Knowing that for To carry this body of an animal forth you experimented with the voice as sculpture and with performed poetry makes me think of how you are pushing the boundaries of the in-between even further: working with multigenerational communication as well as the materiality of words and the body, and carrying all of them forth. When you talk about the horn as sculpture (if I understood this correctly) materialising breath and voice or song, it is almost like a reverse form of ekphrasis; actually it is more, not simply a visual or sculptural response to language, but an instance of further creation and translation.

All this returns us to the title and the spirit of the exhibition, Linnea Axelsson’s Sámi epic, and an interspecies or multispecies relationality, which is shot through, from all that you have been saying, with a Sámi sense of resilience, refusal of capitalist extraction, and hope. I have a few questions, and feel free to respond to what appeals to you most. Would you be open to saying something specific about how two or three artworks in your exhibition take on To carry this body of an animal forth differently? You earlier talked about how the process or artmaking for you coincides with the process of thinking through something. If To carry this body of an animal forth is activated in the exhibition as a whole, I am thinking it is not in one unified or cohesive thought, but more in the spirit of possibilities and contradictions. Not sure I am going in the right direction, but could you mention a piece in the exhibition that came forth in ways that surprised you? And I see that heads, faces, masks hold a significant place in your previous work – as do humans with flower heads. How did your focus on this body of an animal continue and/or change your practice? Finally, as I am thinking about how Linnea Axelsson’s work is an epic, how is storytelling through visual and material art part of this exhibition?

One more observation, more than a question: I love how you brought up the playfulness of your aesthetics and imagination. I think it helps to engage viewers of different ages, to see something new in the quotidian, to reject being victimised, and to encourage unlearning as well as learning. 

You have been very generous with your answers so far,

Cri

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August 6, 2025 

Just a quick follow up, Olof, that is organisational. It seems that we have been asked to have 4 to 5 email exchanges, and once you answer my latest questions we will be well over 4,000 words. I am happy to keep the conversation going because it is so interesting but I am mindful of taking up your time also. Do you think we need to have one more back and forth exchange? If there are things you still want to share, that makes total sense. I really wish I could come and experience your exhibition. When I am in Europe next time, I will check to see where you are exhibiting!

Cri

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August 14, 2025 

You give me such interesting input and ask such interesting questions that I feel compelled to answer in a way that hopefully gives something back to the reader.

Your thoughts on the horns are beautiful, really thoughtful and in line with my own ideas of them. Regarding the poem, it will be heard in Northern Samí language in the exhibition but I think that the sculptures themselves will be titled as the poem and therefore will be translated to English, and available for non-Samí speakers like myself. Your first reply, about translating my text from Swedish to English, gave me some new ideas on how to proceed with this text and sound project in the future. How, ChatGPT for example, can translate text into Samí language. It will be interesting to see what happens to an almost extinct language through the artificial voice and mind of AI. 

Hmm, I guess that quite often thinking about the process takes a bit of time after the work is finished. At the moment, I have just finished packing all the pieces for shipment to 1646 which means I am a bit “nearsighted” right now. But I have been working on a new group of quite big sculptures that I call the dancers. They are a mix of a bit of everything and refer very slightly to an etching by Goya. I made some maquettes of these sculptures last Spring. But the whole process of scaling them up turned out to be hard. Not the practical part but something else has put up enormous resistance. Something was missing almost the whole process in working with these dancers until last weekend, when I realised that they had been asking for their faces. They got some and the whole atmosphere in the studio changed. So yes, in that sense, this new group of sculptures turned out in a way I did not expect or plan for. Maybe the resistance I felt towards them came from an idea that I thought they would be easy to make since I had decided to pick up on some methods I implied a few years ago. At the moment I am intrigued on how they came forth and what they want. 

I think this exhibition represents both a bit of continuation of and some changes in my practice. It has opened up a new path when it comes to work with language and text. Even though the text part is really small, I think it has brought something valuable to me and my practice to engage more with. I think the horn sculptures are quite interesting because they shift away from the figure that I mostly work with. That direction is also intriguing. 

Storytelling is important for me but it is the quiet one through material and shape. I hope that the visitors will get the sensation that the sculptures they meet belong to a rich world of myths and stories. In that encounter, new stories and questions unfold for the visitor. I can only go back to myself. But while I am still in the working process, I am always telling people stories about the work. Hopefully they can be “heard” in the work itself.  

I love the idea of unlearning, it is equally important as learning to me.

Best,

Olof

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August 14, 2025 

Hello Olof!

Your mentioning that you packed the pieces to exhibit at 1646 during the weeks of our email exchange prompts me to think back to how the exhibition’s website emphasises that your art does not ask us to choose between matter or material bodies and digitisation, as well as Sámi and non-Sámi. I wonder, based on your responses, if you are asking us to move back and forth between them. And also how does movement play a part in what you hope your art brings forth in viewers?

As our exchange is soon coming to a close, I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to experience some of your work virtually and some of your thoughts about your art. Unlike your sculptures and installations, I cannot travel to The Hague for the show, which makes me sad. But I feel that, along with the digitised images on your website, your emails have given me several ways to enter the in-between world of stories you create. Thank you. And I will look for a future exhibition of yours when I am in Europe next time!

Cri

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August 23, 2025

Hello Olof,

I did not hear back, so I just wanted to make sure you received my reply. 

Take care,

Cristina

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August 25, 2025

Dear Cri,

On a conceptual level the movement back and forth, in-between, is an answer to the one-dimensional idea of a minority identity and, in that sense, trying to complicate things for the viewer and hopefully move somebody in a direction where they start to unfold the complexity of the issue. With Sweden, or Scandinavia, as a reference point. I would say that most people still have this type of postcard view of Samí people living a carefree life throughout history with a thousand words for snow and no word for war. But more and more voices have started to nuance things for a more general public. In regard to my own work, I am not sure to what extent it is capable of addressing these things in a clear and unfiltered way. At least I see that the team of 1646 have created this opportunity to have a conversation with you to bring up some of the thoughts and complexity. 

In a practical way, movement is always present in my work. I have this “rule” that I am not allowed to sit still in the studio. Even if I do not know what to do, I have to do something. That the process of my studio should be connected to verbs like pour, stack, balance, chop, carve, throw, sew, et cetera. I move back and forth between the more well crafted and the quick gestures. By doing so, I am trying to achieve a playful rhythm within my sculptures. It is also connected to an idea about the unfinished, both in terms of material and thought, as something positive, that opens up the work for further movement. But I think it is important to be able to make a difference between the unfinished and what has been sloppily done. On the other hand, that definition is subjective.  

I might have mentioned it earlier, but I see my work as figures of transition from one place to another. Like all transitions, there is a bit of information lost between the different places. So I hope the viewer can fill in those spaces by themselves.  

It has been a joy to have this conversation with you. It opened up so many thoughts and new ideas to develop to be honest. I am very glad we had it! 

And lastly, I am so sorry that I have been acting like a sloth when answering. But I guess that is one of my different paces of movement.

Best, 

Olof