Norwegian architect and artist Joar Nango (b.1979) wears his Sáminess with pride. Having travelled around the world and experienced primitive polarised opinions that categorise the Sámi culture as "too folkloristic and too ethnically segregated," fuelled him even more to bring change to the discourse. Through his multifaceted practice that covers architecture, site-specific installations, and self-made publications, Nango puts a spotlight on the self-sufficiency of his geographical landscape, its inherent DIY culture, and closeness to wilderness of the Sámi - the semi-nomadic Indigenous people of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and parts of Russia who pursue traditional livelihoods such as reindeer herding and coastal fishing.

In a conversation with STIR, the Áltá-born and Tromsø-based creative walks us through his journey. Speaking with us over a video while on his way to Hanover in Germany, for an upcoming show at the Sprengel Museum, he delves into the value of nomadism in his practice, shares how he navigates misrepresentations of the Sámi culture, and explains how escaping categorisation in his work keeps him sane.

The following are edited excerpts from the interview.

Zohra Khan: What were your childhood and growing-up days like?

Joar Nango: I would say I had a very safe childhood with two sisters close in age, and parents, both teachers, who stuck together and were pedagogically quite present. I was close to culture, art and especially nature through my father. I grew up very much outdoors but not on a farm; it was kind of Norwegian suburbia.

The closeness to nature and art came in various forms and it was quite informing: be it weaving or observing my father who was involved in a Sámi traditional craft of working with wood and bone. I think I grew up as a young Norwegian with all the privileges but at the same time, the fact that I belonged to an Indigenous minority group, the Sámi people, and the knowledge of the colonised history of my culture grew in my awareness through various experiences.

Zohra: Do you recall a definitive memory where you discovered something curious about your indigenous roots?

Joar: I had an experience when I was seven or eight, I was healed by a traditional healer. It was a very strong experience and today a strong memory as well. I never shared this with anyone until I was 18. It was a story that was obviously not to be shared, a memory that was sealed, and I only spoke about that with people from my culture, and I still do. It's something that you find in certain villages in the Sámi areas, and there's still a strong culture for other ways of healing and therapeutically engaging with each other's health, and there are certain people who have gifts that can heal you. When I think about it from a post-perspective, it's something that maybe illustrated for me that there are different ways of culturally behaving and thinking and that there are certain things that are to be kept within a group, and others that are to be shared with a larger group. So I guess, in some ways, at that point, it must have brought a sense of awareness that this is the Sámi world, and then there's another world, with other social codes.

Then other experiences are, in one way, not only positive, but that might deal with how you're named. It’s a thing that you carry with you everywhere, and you can't escape it. As a Sámi, it's a bit peculiar, because we are Indigenous people, but we are white. Skin colour makes it a different type of racism; we are not the same way as, for example, African-Americans, who have had a lot of challenges in terms of those being different visually, through their bodily features. We are dealing with another kind of synergy, where our bodies are camouflaged within the cultural geography of Northern Europe, to a certain extent, but not always. We are shorter and have higher cheekbones, but they are minor compared to what a skin colour would be.

Zohra: Over centuries of co-existence with the extreme climate of the Arctic, the Sámi culture embeds the self-reliance of its people on limited resources and an inherent DIY mentality. Could you share some cues from your childhood that introduced and further reinforced your understanding of this way of life?

Joar: There are so many and mostly related to harvesting. And very often related to my aunt and uncle every time I visited them in their backyards, the whole environment around their house was like an extension of this harvesting process. Tools were standing ready to be used, with four-wheelers or snowmobiles in sight. It’s like the environment where you live is like an extension of yourself, where you express yourself through your activities and architecture, and the physical imprint in the environment that you create is an extension of your cultural identity perhaps. It's an attitude towards the material world and how the material flows around you. You don't go to the store to buy products or fix your problems, partially also because the store is far away. You just look around and source based on what's there.

That’s also why there's very often a material abundance in the Sámi gardens and backyards. It's like a material depot that is accessible, that can become very handy when you need to do some problem-solving or DIY fixing in your backyard. So people, very often from the urban contexts especially, cannot decipher this type of aesthetic because they think it looks like a mess, but that's not what it is. It's actually a resource bank. I think that has a value in itself, thinking about the consumer society and how capitalism has reduced our way of being in the world to this a passive type of receiver of solutions instead of being the one who creates it.

I was always exposed to that differentness, and I could maybe see it a little clearer than people who grew up a hundred per cent in those environments.

Our architecture doesn't have foundations. It steps very lightly on the ground and doesn't leave a mark. There's a value and humbleness in that. We don't strive to create monumentality.

Zohra: Do you recall the first piece of architecture that got you transfixed?

Joar: It's a big cliche answer, but so easy because it's Lavvu, our traditional tent that is the most incredible space that all Sámis grow up around with access to living in, on the mountains with an open fireplace, sleeping on the first layer of soft birch branches on the ground with the reindeer skin on top of it. You know, the reindeer skin has hollow hairs that make it the best insulation layer you can imagine that nature has ever created. Having experience of spending days and nights in a tent, cooking on the fireplace and indulging in conversations around it, sleeping there in the dark while other people are rolled up in their sleeping bags, has a special kind of intimacy and a closeness to nature. And that very immediate way of living in nature shapes you quite a lot when you experience it from a young age.

Our architecture doesn't have foundations. It steps very lightly on the ground and doesn't leave a mark. There's value and humbleness in that. We don't strive to create monumentality. It's so easy for this to end up sounding like a romantic cliche about the noble savage in the wilderness and that's why I prefer leaving it up to architecture as an aesthetic kind of methodology and system rather than using words that sound like Clint Eastwood from Dances with Wolves.

Zohra: In the past you have extensively spoken about the sheer disconnect you faced in your university days where you encountered a lack of education on indigenous architecture, particularly knowledge on the Sámi culture. What was this experience like?

Joar: That's a memory that still feels a bit fresh to me. I was politically a bit active with the Sámi rights movement before I started studying, so when I went to the university, I was already quite embedded in the works towards Sámi culture, expressions and identity rights.

When we had our first class of architectural history, it had a part which talked about Sámi architecture. A page within this thick book, that we had for a whole year or two of curriculum on Norwegian architectural history, presented Sámi architecture as a very museological, folkloristic type of information about a culture that was long gone. I remember the feeling of sitting in a group of Norwegian architecture students, and the topic of Sáminess was very uncomfortable. I don’t think the teacher even knew that I was a Sámi. I didn’t jump up and respond to the situation; I just quietly closed the book, sat through the class, and then went up straight to the library. I knew that Sámi architecture was much more than what I read in the class and it was at that moment I started researching Sámi architecture.

I still ask the question of what Sámi architecture is, but more so, I make platforms where people can join me in this conversation and learn from it. I try to bring new perspectives, avoiding them from becoming too folkloristic and ethnically segregated. I want it to be a topic that everyone can engage with, being Sámi or not. It’s very important for me to blur these borders, this polarised idea about us and them.

Zohra: You spoke about the idea of architecture being an ephemeral, very light and fragile structure in the Sámi culture. However, there is a looming Western narrative that upholds timeless buildings.

Joar: I am an architect who is also trained as an artist. I think as an artist, it's much more natural to attack the status quo so finding concepts that are critiquing the stability of the world is something that very often artists think as a part of their purpose. I find this instability, the temporality, a beautiful counter concept to speak about a larger idea about what architecture is. And this way of dealing with another way of understanding humanity is very important, and I think I have, by chance, been very lucky to have been born into this goldmine of concepts that is still very present and urgently important.

I see a lot of architects and designers around me who are always reinventing aesthetics but are using old concepts. I think it's rewarding to tap into traditions that are already there and build traditional structures, using old traditional knowledge and putting them forth as a part of the architectural critique. It becomes more universal to me in a sense, and not so connected necessarily to my own artistic self-consciousness and narcissism.

Zohra: A dominant narrative associated with the Sámi architecture associates it with the idea of exoticism. Does this perception hinder your creative process or the sanctity of a message you intend to present with a piece of work?

Joar: It’s a difficult question and I'm not even sure if I'm the right person to answer that. I could just speak about how I feel about it. I think I belong to another generation, starting with me maybe, and I also see people younger than me who are unafraid of this type of aesthetical romanticisation. They're playing around with it and using it as a deliberate tool to reach out with their message. And, it's not that we invented this primitive understanding of indigenous cultures but it's still there and can be used as an accelerating energy. And because we are in control of it, we can use it to almost manipulate the narrative.

Take the example of the reindeer skin, it is such an incredible technology. It is so warm and constantly accessible for someone who lives up here and has friends and family in reindeer herding. It's the most natural thing to use when I build installations and spaces. So if someone thinks that it’s romanticising to use this material, why should I even bother dealing with that type of comment? It's just contextual; it's about how you see it, where you're from and your relationship with this material. As a Sámi, with my aesthetic, I feel I should be entitled to express myself with my rooted language.

Zohra: You seem to enjoy the idea of evasiveness in your practice in which you are constantly blurring the boundaries of art, architecture, and pedagogy. Do you think it's a quirk perhaps, and how does this fluidity impact your work?

Joar: I am not sure. Sometimes it feels like an instinct that I was born with, and maybe I’m also trained to manoeuvre within as an indigenous person because we are so often stigmatised. Many preconceived ideas about who we are are such a constraining type of representation role to deal with – this idea about us living in this prehistoric type of non-contemporary world. I am constantly juggling these misconceptions and find a lot of existential freedom in creating my own type of space. Sometimes I don’t even know if it is a conscious choice, it feels like I am doing it because I am finding pleasure in it, in creating small bubbles of autonomy in a way in which I decide what Sámi architecture is even if I work a lot with people who are not Sámis.

Zohra: Can you name a material that you often gravitate towards in your practice?

Joar: Nothing is more rewarding than working with freshly harvested wood.

I think the art world is a place to get a bit lost and that it doesn't have the delicious, pragmatic meaning or functionality that I often find in design and architectural practices. But then I also feel trapped sitting in front of a computer and doing architecture that only has a purpose and not space for my aesthetic creativity. I'm privileged that I can do both.

Zohra: Nomadism is an essential tenet in your practice. While you believe that the Western world perceives it as something that is ‘placeless’, you deem it as ‘an ultimate site-specific context’.

Joar: I think nomadism is a very generic word that has a lot of room for speculation. If you look at the book A Thousand Plateaus by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze—an art student's Bible in the 90s—it has a chapter where they tap into the word nomadism and discuss what they think of the concept of striated versus smooth spaces. I find it quite cool as a visual philosophical concept where it is described in a very dichotomic way of thinking or using space. Striated is a very controlled and institutional hierarchical powers type of space, while a smooth or nomadic space exemplifies attacking a more uncontrolled space or an aesthetic concept, and these two, are in constant flow and almost weigh each other out. I think that nomadism is very important to think about in that way because it is perhaps the war machine as they described it, machinery that somehow attacks the status quo.

For me, the word nomadism also has a very anthropological kind of cultural dimension to it, which is that my people are semi-nomadic this time and moving with the reindeer. The reindeer herding lifestyle and culture, which was my uncle's and my family's background, informs spatial production in an extreme way, which I find very interesting. From having a political charge, it also has a cultural meaning for me that also talks about dealing with closeness to landscape, closeness to material and climate. When I say closeness, I mean, understanding, and by understanding, I also mean understanding through survival and harvesting, understanding through resourceful thinking.

Zohra: What do you enjoy and detest the most in your roles as an artist and architect?

Joar: As an architect, I build environments, playgrounds, smaller museum exhibitions etc. I enjoy being part of the craft and creating ideas. I like to be in space when we build. I usually place myself for a couple of days or a week or two in the production on-site and feel rejuvenated while working with materials and tools.

When it comes to art, like now, for example, I'm doing an exhibition in an art gallery at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. It's free and I can do whatever I want. And sometimes it can be a little challenging when I long for some practical framework to do things. So then I create the practical framework to work myself into it. I think the art world is a place to get a bit lost and it doesn't have the delicious, pragmatic meaning or functionality that I often find in design and architectural practices. But then I also feel trapped sitting in front of a computer and doing architecture that only has a purpose and not space for my aesthetic creativity. I'm privileged that I can do both, and I think that that also keeps me sane.

Zohra: What does home mean to you?

Joar: For me, landscape is key to address in the idea of a home because it all comes down to the question of land rights. In everything I do, the landscape and our relationship with the land are very important.

Zohra: What is NEXT for you?

Joar: I'm going to Nuuk in Greenland next year where we’ll be doing a conference and building a structure. I'm also travelling to New Zealand, to Aotearoa, where I will host a seminar on Maori architecture. I am also trying to make space for other Sámi architects. We are nine architects forming a Sámi architectural association and I hope that engaging other people in a similar conversation can also give them opportunities and strengthen a broader conversation about Sámi architecture.