Mathias Danbolt in Relation to Researching with Artists
IPA’s talk-series “In relation to”
Please sign up for participation by e-mail to: pelyma@cc.au.dk no later than June 2nd.
A zoom-link will be sent out upon registration.
Mathias Danbolt in Relation to Researching with Artists
In colonial contexts, such as Sápmi (the land of the Indigenous Sámi population that traverses the settler colonial nation states of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia), the figure of the researcher keeps being a contentious one. As the Sámi artist Nils-Aslak Valkeapää sardonically explained in the decolonial manifesto Greetings from Lappland (1971/1982), “an average Sámi family consists of parents, three children and an anthropologist”. As an art historian with special focus on the relationship between art and colonial histories in a Nordic context, this colonial history of extractivist research has been an unavoidable backdrop to the different projects I’ve been part of relating to the role of art and aesthetics in the colonization of Sápmi. One way to navigate my role as a settler scholar has been to develop projects in close collaboration with Sámi researchers and artists. In the context of “In relation to…” I would like to share some reflections related to my collaborative research with Sámi artist and architect Joar Nango on early colonial images of Sámi architecture made by Danish missionaries in the 18th century that I have found in the archives of the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen. Collaborating with Nango has been transformative on many levels for my research practice, and I would like to share some of the numerous questions that keep coming up in relation to my role and responsibility as a settler scholar when working with colonial art histories as well as Indigenous art and artists.