IASPIS 30: common acts for grounded futures

Graphic Design: Jonas Williamsson

IASPIS 30: common acts for grounded futures

IASPIS 30: common acts for grounded futures

Čálihit iežas lundui / To Write Oneself into the Landscape / Att skriva in sig i landskapet with Katarina Pirak Sikku and Anneli Bäckman.

Anneli Bäckman, Curator at Gaaltije Saemien Museume, and artist Katarina Pirak Sikku will center Sámi persistence and presence carried through land and its continuities.

The event takes place at a moment of particular urgency and historical significance. In 2026, the Swedish Truth Commission for the Sámi People (Sanningskommissionen för det samiska folket) will publish its final report, marking a critical process of confronting Sweden’s colonial violence toward Sámi communities. The commission gathers testimonies and historical accounts concerning boarding schools, loss of language, land dispossession, racial biology, and the systematic dismantling of Sámi lifeworlds. Yet beyond recognition lies another question: how can institutions remain accountable to these histories over time, and what would it mean to move beyond symbolic acknowledgment toward structural transformation?

Katarina Pirak Sikku

Pirak Sikku’s work approaches landscape as a site marked by extraction, interruption, remembrance, and return. Fragments of testimony and ritual gestures form a shifting constellation where personal memory encounters collective history. The lecture performance commissioned for IASPIS asks how one becomes inscribed into a place — and how territories themselves carry grief, resistance, and continuity.

The evening also touches upon imposed forms of history writing, museum collections, repatriation, and institutional responsibility. What remains outside official archives? What kinds of violence are normalized through collecting practices and state narratives? And how might artistic practice reopen forms of relation that colonial systems attempted to sever?

Indigenous epistemologies fundamentally unsettle extractive understandings of the environment by refusing the separation between human life and the living world. Land appears as relation and inhabited reciprocally.

Anneli Bäckman

Anneli Bäckman’s presentation will reflect on the significance of the past year’s research and on the responsibilities museums, cultural institutions, and public authorities carry in relation to Sámi histories and future forms of stewardship.

The event is part of IASPIS 30: common acts for grounded futures, initiated by Corina Oprea, IASPIS Guest Curator, as a long-form programme unfolding across 2025–2026 through gatherings, performances, conversations, and sonic and discursive formats. Rather than offering a retrospective account of the institution, the programme considers how artistic methodologies emerge from conditions of fragility, interdependence, ecological transformation, and political uncertainty. It asks how exchange can be rooted in solidarity, reciprocity, and decolonial attention, and how artistic practices might cultivate forms of relation capable of sustaining grounded futures collectively.

Graphic design: Jonas Williamsson. Referencing IASPIS work by Andreas and Fredrika, Martin Frostner, Mattias Givell, Konst & Teknik, Johanna Lewengard, Mu AB and Åbäke through letterforms from three decades of practice.