Language, like sound, can be broken into tiny fragments, looped, stretched, explored in ways that create new possibilities and potentialities. This new listening work by Sondre Närva Pettersen, explores both how Norwegianisation policies have threatened the specific Sámi dialect and joik of his family's homeplace by Moskavuotna/Ullsfjorden, and how Sámi culture still survives in pockets of embodied memory and practice today.
Närva brings together joik, Sámi hymn traditions, modular synths, and oral stories of Norwegianisation from local residents of Moskavuotna/Ullsfjorden, to explore the transformative role of art and music in the journey toward reconciliation. The piece explores how deep Sámi and Kven culture cannot simply vanish after 50 years of Norwegianisation between 1900–1950. But rather how the culture transforms, adopts new Norwegian names, and becomes obscured. Through this piece for Borealis, Närva aims to contribute to a living, vibrant Coastal Sámi contemporary culture that both examines its roots and reaches toward the future.
Commissioned together with the unique listening space of Jiennagoahti, the Sámi listening hut perched on the side of Mount Fløyen, this work takes us into a sound world that is both ancient and modern, and is part of Borealis’ ongoing commitment to exploring Sámi sonic experimentalism today, and how new forms of sound and music can explore the resurgence of culture and language in the aftermath of colonial policies of erasure