In 2024, I was part of the collaborative project "Electric Lies: Broken Ground", at the Saari Residence in Finland. The project brought together a collective of Indigenous artists from across the globe to critically explore the rhetoric of the "green shift" in energy production and its often-destructive impact on Indigenous lands and communities.
Responding to the political controversy surrounding the industrial wind farm at Fosen, Norway, the project reflected on how ecological destruction is often masked as sustainable development. Through interdisciplinary and embodied practices including joik, movement, poetry, visual art, and performance we worked to expose suppressed truths, reclaim narratives, and propose new ways of relating to land and nature.
As part of this collaboration, I contributed visual and archival materials informed by my background in visual anthropology and political ecology, drawing connections between environmental grief, colonial extractivism, and land-based knowledge from the Bengal Delta.
Together, we developed a poetic, performative exhibition that invited audiences to listen to the land through the body, and to reconsider their relationship with nature and extraction.
The workgroup at Saari Residency was
Camilla Therese Karlsen, sea Sámi from Norway, dancer, acrobat, choreographer, curator and poet
Madhumita Nandi, from India with roots in the Bengaldelta, visual artist, photography
Elisabeth Heilmann Blind, Inuit from Greenland, Inuit mask dancer and butoh dancer
Lars Henrik Blind, Sámi from Sweden, traditional joik artist and poet
Aleksi Nittyvuopio, Sámi from Finland, juggler and object manipulator
Darlene Naponse, First Nation from Canada, filmmaker and poet
Marit Shirin Carolasdotter, from Sweden, Sámi and Kurdic roots, dancer and choreographer