MAPPING METHODS: A PROTOCOL IN PROGRESS FOR MAPPING

We are developing a protocol for mapping, based on methods of understanding the data/research: we are — layering temporalities —reconstructing memories —inverting images —making anti-hierarchical indexes — situating narratives — and accumulating narratives.

Layering temporalities:
Observing the greater Sarek area’s cartographies’, there are four maps that stand out in scientific and historical significance: Generalstabskartan 1895, Axel Hamberg’s first map, Axel Hamberg’s second map, and the Swedish mapping authorities’ contemporary map. Usually, temporalities like these are presented separately, as moments in time that interchanged with each other. By layering them we can start to understand the history of orthography and how non-native cartographers have influenced the orthography of today.

Anti-hierarchical indexing:
Hierarchies define significance and peripheries. For example, the consecutive emphasis on lake Áhkájávrre is putting the extraction of hydropower in focus. Yet these hierarchies can be flattened, or even juxtaposed, by for instance presenting the surrounding valley and goahti, or by highlighting orthographic wrong-doings. Working with hierarchies allows for subjective and situated readings of regions, opposing the imposed perspective.

Reconstructing memories:
In insufficiently represented areas, important information can be concealed in memories that are on the verge of being forgotten. Court hearings, tax protocols, memoirs, and interviews make up a puzzle that reconstructs the histories. These reconstructions can, for instance, give us a clue of how the last state documented Sámi owned land looked like – where these regions most likely were and the potentiality of this land if it would have remained with its owners.

Inverting images:
It is almost impossible to imagine Sarek without picturing its mountains and massifs. But the area wasn’t always pictured through the peaks. Before they caught the attention of Swedish glaciologists, the mountains were considered less important than the valleys, as they provided reindeer with food and shelter, while the glaciers and mountain tops had dangerous cracks and openings for the reindeer to move on and should hence be avoided. With highlights often following the perspective of the glaciologist, the inverted image helps present the other story.

Situating narratives:
Countering the idea of data as having the potential of being universal or representing absolute knowledge, our data points are not intending to act as surveys. As a singular story, data samples are pointing at histories or narratives true for the particular experience it represents. For example, the trail in Sarek represents the walking pattern of Apmut Ivar Kuoljok in 1944. Quotes and testimonies represent individual memories.

Accumulating narratives:
An accumulation of neglected, contradicting, and uncomfortable knowledge, presented together as a joint and abstract landscape evokes a diverse image. Even though contemporary GPS data from a single reindeer might not have a direct correlation with ancient Sámi remains (even less so with the immaterial cultural heritage), STF hiking trails, or drowned lakes, the accumulation of these singular data points can together represent a narrative of the land that considers more than one truth.

PRACTICE-LED ARTISTIC RESEARCH&KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION

Practice-led artistic research is a research practice that not only places the practice in the research process, but leads the research through the practice. Originally proposed by artists/researchers and researchers in the creative community, this new strategy is known as creative practice as research, performance as research, research through practice, studio research, practice as research, or practice-led research.¹ Practice-led research is by its very nature experiential and comes to the forefront of the practice-based artistic process and its associated methodology. A practice-based research strategy works based on a reflective practice that includes reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action; participant-based research; participatory research; collaborative investigation and action investigation. A practice-based strategy that always interprets; how and in what way it is possible to make a clear contribution to a field of knowledge. Rather than favouring a discipline’s intellectual or conceptual architecture, this drive for research is concerned with improving practice, and forming new epistemologies of practice separated from initiated understandings of action in context.² The situated knowledge created in such a process can further act as a conversation leader in the form of its statement of practice rather than of a fixed term, cataloguing, or result.³

In practice-led artistic research, the practice is the main research activity – rather than just the practice of presentation – in which the practitioner sees the material results of the practice as important representations of research findings in their own right. Certainly, performative research derives from relativistic ontology and celebrates multiple constructed realities. Its multifaceted potential operates through interpretive epistemologies where the knower and the known interact, shape and interpret the other.⁴ Artistic research as practice can thus enable opportunities for the development of situated knowledge, and the investigation of how shared or common knowledge is organised, practiced, or archived and displayed, as a means of protection or advocacy. With a starting point of a methodology based on reconfiguration or remapping – Data Free Zone SWE/SÁPMI_1 explores how knowledge systems are structured – posing ethical and political questions about knowledge-theoretic ownership, entitlement, access and community.⁵

This perspective allows artistic research to act from a partial, semi-visible perspective and from a collectively limited voice – not in part for its own sake, but rather for the connection it allows, and the unexpected openings that situated knowledge enables.⁶Practice-led researchers therefore construct experiential starting points from which the practice they follow tends to mean rather that they ‘pop into’ research to see what pops up’, while acknowledging that the outcome is individualistic and idiosyncratic.

Practice-based artistic research takes its agency from its way of insisting that research results and their claim to knowledge must be made through the symbolic gestures and forms that are shaped for and by its practice. The result does not necessarily have to be translated into numbers (quantitative) or words (qualitative), which are preferred in the traditional research paradigm. The possibility of artistic research is therefore admitted in the reproduction of the investigation through results and material forms of practice that can challenge traditional ways of representing knowledge claims. It also means that anyone who wants to evaluate the research results also need to experience them directly through co-presence or indirectly, in an asynchronous, recorded form.⁷

Critically formulated, however, the question of the relationship between art and knowledge cannot only aim to deconstruct the unstable rhetoric surrounding the positioning of contemporary art – but work to draw a line between conformist and depoliticising ways of looking at the relationship between art and knowledge in established institutional contexts. This approach strives for different, oppositional ways of elucidating ‘knowledge’ in counter-archives and shaping (para)institutional tools for framing contemporary art. An epistemological inquiry within contemporary art could then appear to be non-linear, non-historical, non-theological and based on issues surrounding struggle and be contentious in nature about so-called gains and losses, be contradictory and highlight temporary outcomes from the dominant power and knowledge dynamics.⁸

In the much-debated category of contemporary art, considered in terms of artistic practices and research on and about the present, we can distinguish the capacity of contemporary art as a strategic investment in social distinctions and value extracts made possible by claiming already declared truths, admittedly privileged, and questioning the general preferential access to knowledge.⁹Similarly, the social constructivist stance is clear about the official ideology of objectivity and scientific methods typically being inadequate to illustrate how scientific knowledge is actually created.¹⁰ As contemporary art establishes and operates in close relations with the social and natural sciences through its transdisciplinary research, it is also guilty of creating narratives around the perception of the increased functionality of knowledge in its far-reaching, technologically enforced mutation.¹¹

A politics around and about ‘knowledge’ is not only central to the expanding infrastructure around knowledge production, but also important in practice-led artistic research as a contemporary innovation. To the extent that its social and economic effects manifest the global contemporary problem of education, literacy and citizenship – citizenship in the ruins of the welfare state – and how it has the possibility of being distributed.¹² Objectivity is not about absolving responsibility, but about mutual and usually unequal structuring, about taking risks in a world where ‘we’ are permanently mortal, that is, not in ‘ultimate’ control. Of course, it enables a look at how bias, objectivity and situated knowledge can discursively act as a conversation based on gestures of potent nodes for other possible meanings about how we view the present.¹³ Artistic research cannot be confirmatory in that way, but can act more freely than the hard reins of scientific research.

AHKKA: SUMMARY OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE SUOORVVA DAM 1917-2022

Between 1919 and 1972, more than 240 goahtis and their surrounding lands were flooded in the areas around Áhkájávrre. Through four interventions, dams were built to regulate water levels and support hydroelectric extraction. Eleven lakes were merged into one ocean — resulting in forced displacements and mixed social environments for hundreds of affected Sámis.

In 1908, the Swedish energy company, Vattenfall, started making drafts of how to support the Iron Ore Line in northern Sweden. At the time, the ore-transporting carriages were being increasingly powered by electricity, a shift that had radically made production more effective. With powerful rivers flowing from mountains at the northern Sweden-Norway border, there was optimism for hydroelectricity. And after presenting plans to extract energy from Julevädno (Lule River), in 1910 the Swedish government ordered the construction of Bårjås (Porjus) hydroelectric power station. This suggested the construction of dams that would affect lakes along the pasturelands of the Sámi villages Sirgas and Unna Tjerusj.¹

The specific lakes affected – Ruotjajaure, Rautojaure, Jerfakaskajaure, Sasjaure,
Luoktanjarkajaure, Alemusjaure, Kallajaure, Vuoksajaure, Suorvajaure, Päskajaure, Kåtsjitjaure²– were at the time hosting the ecosystems of the Sámi villages: fishing, hunting, reindeer husbandry, transportation and social lives. The ecosystem had been developing over centuries of living with the massif and its entanglements.

A report from Luleå University of Technology depicts the timeline³: the dam that would take its initial shape in 1923 was to control the eleven lakes, in total a 60 km chain of water. The installation of turbines and generators at the outflow would steadily produce electricity. A powerful institution made to serve Swedish industrialisation at any cost.

The dams were modified three times. The first iteration was finished in 1941 and made it possible to produce enough electricity for export to central Sweden. This increased the height of the dams by seven metres. The second renovation was finished just three years later in 1944. 350 workers constructed an additional 140 m concrete dam while increasing the height of the original dams by about three metres. The walls made it possible to supply an additional iron mine with electricity while securing domestic energy production throughout the war.

At the time, the 18.4 m increase in water levels had already created unsettling and devastating grounds for the Sámi communities and locals living in the area. In an excerpt from the publication Vaisaluokta under 100 år, Sara Valkeapää remembers the time just before the fourth reworking: “They came and coloured the trees with red and blue paint. Mum pointed at the blue marks and said that’s how far the water will reach. I thought to myself that it couldn’t be true. That far! But it was true”.⁴

The fourth iteration meant new dams and a total increase in water levels of 30 metres. Homes and pasturelands vanished. And today, the irregular water flows make the waters dangerous – not knowing where the boats will hit rocks or when the waves on the open ocean will be too high. Still, following the rivers and lands upwards in the west, the pasturelands continue and so do the sources of water to the dams. Some of these rivers are protected, but others might be subject to further exploitation. While the EU has established laws to protect some waters, Vattenfall receives subsidised taxes to fight the law — and at this point, perhaps to no one’s surprise, the discount is being financed by higher energy prices for those still living in the area.⁵

A TIMELINE OF RUOTJAJAURE, RAUTOJAURE, JERFAKASKAJAURE, SASJAURE, LUOKTANJARKAJAURE, ALEMUSJAURE, KALLAJAURE, VUOKSAJAURE, SUORVAJAURE, PÄSKAJAURE, KÅTSJITJAURE FLOODINGS⁶

1908 — Increased demand for electricity to support the Iron Ore Line in Norrbotten County

— Pasturelands of Sámi villages Sirges and Unna Tjerusj along Julevädno (Lule River) are proposed for hydroelectric extraction

1910 — The government orders the construction of Porjus hydroelectric power station, at the outflow of Julevädno (Lule River)

1917 — The Royal Academy of Sciences and the government-appointed Sámi bailiff agree that such an intervention violates ancient Sámi land rights

1919 — The proposed area has its status as a nature reserve withdrawn

— County administrative board and the Board of Agriculture approve construction

— Government-appointed Lappkommittén approves construction

— Parliament approves construction

— The Swedish energy company Vattenfall begins construction

1921 — Special court for Swedish water approves construction

— Monarchy of Sweden approves construction

1923 — Two dams are completed

— Water levels in affected lakes increase by 8.5 metres

1937 — Vattenfall presents options to increase dam height by either three or seven metres

— Government orders three-metre increase, but quickly revises this to seven metres

1941 — Superstructures are completed

— Water levels in affected lakes increase by a total of 15.3 metres

1942 — Swedish Government orders further adjustment to existing dams and construction of an additional dam to support increased water levels

1944 — Construction is completed

— The three dams support a water level increase of 18.4 metres

— 6700 hectares of living and pastureland is put underwater

1961 — The Nature Conservation Delegation and Vattenfall agree on which Sámi rivers to continue exploiting and which to preserve. No Sámis are heard on the matter.

1966 — Three new dams, more than double the height of previous ones, are ordered to replace old constructions

— The 12.2 metres of increased water levels are approved despite no agreement being reached on compensation with the Sámi village Sirges

1972 — New dams completed

— Eleven lakes; Ruotjajaure, Rautojaure, Jerfakaskajaure, Sasjaure, Luoktanjarkajaure, Alemusjaure, Kallajaure, Vuoksajaure, Suorvajaure, Päskajaure, Kåtsjitjaure are completely merged into one

— 12,000 hectares of pastureland and 280+ goahtis are now underwater

1983 — Leakage is discovered and clogged within 48 hours avoiding disastrous residues

2016 — Vattenfall receives subsidised property tax to finance legal procedures

— Increased energy tax to finance property tax subsidy

2027 — Deadline for updated court review of current exploitation of lakes

¹The timeline of events and all technical descriptions are sourced from “Suorvadammarna, ett byggnadstekniskt storverk”, Luleå Tekniska Universitet, 2004.
²The names were recorded by ethnographer Ernst Manker before the floodings in a map published in “Acta Laponica”, 1939-1940. The spelling of the names is subject to bias.
³Also from the report “Suorvadammarna ett byggnadstekniskt storverk”.
⁴Read: Vaisaluokta under 100 år, Gertrude Hanes, Vaisa sameförening 2001.
⁵According to research by Åsa Össbo: Är framtiden ”off-grid”?, blogg.vk.se 2019.
⁶Suorvadammarna, ett byggnadstekniskt storverk, Luleå Tekniska Universitet, 2004.

KAITUM: A HEIST

Written recordings (dating 1645–1845) of Sámi tax lands, found in the archives of district courts and county authorities¹, are some of the oldest authorised descriptions of Sámi land possession. A holder of a Sámi tax land could be an individual Sámi, a Sámi family, or minor collectives tax lands were defined as properties that could be both inherited and sold.² While no exact outlines of the properties are given in the written recordings, they contain indicative summaries from land dispute court meetings — giving descriptions of geographies that suggest territories.³ The records can be seen as evidence of Sámi land ownership and as the last stately official relics of Sámi’s historical connection to the land.

From the 18th century onwards, partly through the political deconstruction of the tax lands — the Sámi’s lands started to be gradually taken from them.⁴ The governor of West Bothnia argued towards the end of the 1600s that Sámis occupied more land than they needed.⁵ Therefore, he suggested that settlers and farmers share the tax lands with the Sámi.⁶ And in 1789, as Swedish farmers all over the country were granted the right to own their land — a privilege until then only held by people of higher social status — the Sámi’s rights were instead degraded.⁷ A tax land became considered owned by the crown, and as a holder, you were simply renting it.⁸ While the idea of a tax land already claimed Sámi land to be under Swedish jurisdiction, this degradation marked an important step for Swedish colonisers. The lands could no longer be inherited or managed by anyone but the Swedish authorities — and the Sámi no longer had possession of any of their land.

Throughout the 1800s, new juridical terms were invented to manage and cut down Sámi rights. The first Reindeer Grazing Act (RBL, 1886) turned the Sámi’s individual land rights into collective rights. And an 1898 iteration of the act made land protection worse by ambiguously claiming that “whoever owns or uses land may not take measures that result in considerable disadvantages for reindeer husbandry”.⁹A paragraph that can be read in many ways — however, it was clear by this time that the Sámi’s rights were limited to their economic contribution.

Later, regulations in the Reindeer Husbandry Act established the Sámi’s hunting and fishing rights. But it did not give them the right to administrate the rights — meaning that they didn’t get exclusive rights.¹⁰ However, in a Supreme Court’s so-called Girjasdom (Girjas Sami village against the state, Supreme Court 23.1 2020 in case no. T 853-18) from 2020, the right to license small game hunting and fishing in mountain areas was tested. For the first time, the Girjas judgment establishes legal practice on Sami land rights and claims of ancient times as well as the rights of indigenous peoples vis-à-vis the Swedish state’s consent and the state’s right to grant rights on Sami land according to current legislation. The verdict can be considered an important precedent – for the indigenous world over – that requires further judicial review as political respect¹¹

¹These are the recordings we are referencing K.B. Wiklunds avskriftssamling, Riksarkivet
²Gurun Norstedt summarises the history of tax lands https://www.samer.se/2441
³From an email conversation with Peter Sköld, Professor of History at Umeå University, summer 2022.
⁴The Sámi Parliament has published a brief history of the tax lands here: Om ILO 168
⁵Lennar Lundmark, PhD in History, was appointed by the Swedish government to summarise the history of the tax land. His work can be found here: Rennäringens historiska gränslinjer, SOU 2006:14
⁶From Lundmark’s report.
⁷From The Sámi Parliament’s website.
⁸From Lundmark’s report.
⁹From The Sámi Parliament’s website.
¹⁰From The Sámi Parliament’s website.
¹¹https://svjt.se/svjt/2020/429

SAREK: A SWEDISH EAR AND TOUNGE

In the north-eastern corner of Sarek National Park lies the lake Bietsávvre. If you’re not a Lule-Sámi native, the name can be understood by breaking it into two parts: Biets- which is a simplified version of the word biehts-/biehtse — meaning pine, and -ávvre, stemming from the word jávrre, lake. Bietsávvre = the pine lake. Surprisingly, there are no pine trees to be found at the lake today. Due to the land rise, Bietsávvre has risen above the treeline, where the temperatures are too low and the winds too strong for pine trees to take root. In fact, the lake got its name in the Stone Age when it was situated 200 m below its current position.

Besides a handful of historical findings, such as dried-up and preserved pine trees that were injured from bark harvesting, the name Bietsávrre is now merely an archive of a Sámi temporality.¹ The Sámi’s orthographic system often operates in this manner. The names give clues about their surroundings. Learning orthography is an essential way to navigate and situate oneself. Many words are barely translatable or require whole sentences and expressions to be explained.² Yet in a cartographic context, these advanced indexes have been overlooked — in favour of Swedish cartographic standards. The Sámi spellings have often been remodelled into Swedish linguistic and orthographic standards, ignoring their meanings. The names have been misheard, mispronounced and misspelt by settler-colonial scientists, but also by inhabitants in the area due to Swedisfication and Finnishified spelling.³

For instance, in 1895 our pine lake Bietsávvre was named Petsaure on the map “Generalstabskartan”. The name here is in several instances adapted to a Swedish ear and tongue. It seems that the Lule-Sámi b-sound is represented with a p, the ie diphthong is simplified to a Swedish simple e and the digraphic rr is a singular r. Updating spellings over the course of more than 100 years is not necessarily controversial. Languages change and develop, and the ways to document it need to keep up the pace. However, in this case, the written documentation of Sámi orthography has on several occasions been done by non-natives.⁴ This exposes the language to misinterpretation and confusion.

The mountaintop Rájvotjåhkkå (located outside of the map) is one example. Tjåhkkå means mountain in Lule-Sámi. However, the prefix Rájvo is unclear. Local resident Per-Eric Kuoljok writes on his Instagram, “There is no explanation of Rájvotjåhkkå in the local Sámi language. However, if you remove the first letter so that it becomes Ájvvotjåhkkå, the name has a meaning. (…) Ájvvo stands for a sharp edge.

” Per-Erik Kuoljok’s text is accompanied by an image of the mountain (R)ájvotjåhkkå with a sharp and significant precipice.⁵

In the 20th century, glaciologist Axel Hamberg advanced into Sarek and created his first cartographic representation of it (1922).⁶ The map seemed to introduce a new perspective of the area: one that shifted the perspective from the Sami perspective of valleys, waters, isthmus and rivers — up to the researcher’s fascination for mountain peaks and glaciers. Hamberg took the liberty of naming several of the peaks, using Swedish naming standards. Sadelkammen⁷ (the saddle ridge) has its origins in “saddle” — an object not used in the Sámi culture. Buchtjökeln⁸ — named after his friend Bucht, a Swedish cartographer working with Hamberg⁹. For another peak, he used his own name; Axel Hamberg’s peak¹⁰. Archives today have blindly implemented Hamberg’s names, leaving the old Sámi names only to be imagined.

Hamberg’s orthography is still applied in the Swedish Land Survey Authority’s maps, and the perspective he applied still has effects in the area. Today, hiking tourists make the pilgrimage to the Sarek massifs to see its many peaks — but not its deep valleys, rich waters, and fertile mountainsides. They speed through the landscape of Sápmi using marked routes and bridges, quickly forgetting, or barely gets the chance to get acquainted with the culture that preceded it. Instead, they gaze into an imagined wilderness. A lie that is told to allow mountains to turn into gravel, forests into sawdust, and water into fuel.

¹Go to https://levandelandskap.com/ and find Bietsávvre, click the pin.
²https://www.svenskaturistforeningen.se/guider-tips/fjallen/samiska-ortsnamn/
³From email conversations with The Sámi Parliament language consultant about Áhkajávvre.
⁴https://historiskakartor.lantmateriet.se/hk/viewer/internal/J242-13-1/52414b5f4a3234322d31332d31/rak2/RAK/Stora%20Sj%C3%B6fallet,%2013-1/Generalstabskartan
⁵Follow: https://www.instagram.com/p/Ccv1U6mKFWU/
⁶https://www.utsidan.se/obj/docpart/c/c32edc0afb0326f3640e1f257294c372.jpg
⁷https://www.utsidan.se/obj/docpart/3/3e8e40ce8c442b35b965454b1937d45a.jpg
⁸https://www.utsidan.se/obj/docpart/3/3e8e40ce8c442b35b965454b1937d45a.jpg
⁹A little tricky to find, but it’s documented in Geografiska Annaler, Scientific Investigations In The Kebnekaise Massif, Swedish Lappland III, Erik Woxnerud, 1951, Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography.
¹⁰https://www.utsidan.se/obj/docpart/3/3e8e40ce8c442b35b965454b1937d45a.jpg