The Butterfly Effect | Ánde Somby | Being A Guest: Acknowledging Indigenous Land
Channel: Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum
Date: 2024-02-09

For the third event in our ongoing series, "The Butterfly Effect. Can small shifts in museum practice generate seismic change across our societies?", we invited laywer, activist, and yoik/luohti artist, Ánde Somby to deliver a talk title, Being A Guest: Acknowledging Indigenous Land. 

In his talk, Somby discussed his own land acknowledgement practice and how those personal practices can be adopted on an institutional level. Through joiking and personal narratives, he discussed the value of a land acknowledgement to Indigenous peoples, how his own practice is rooted in spirituality and ancestral connections, and how to counter the heightened emotional tension that come with difficult confrontations with violent and exploitative histories. He joiked two acknowledgements, one to the island of Tromsøya/Romssasuolu and one to acknowledge the oppression of women, demonstrating how acknowledgements can extend beyond the land and toward reconciling other issues as well. 

"The Butterfly Effect. Can small shifts in museum practice generate seismic change across our societies?" is a new and evolving public programme, conceieved and presented by Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum. It convenes curators, artists, museum professionals, activists and more whose thinking we admire, to consider radical museum and institutional models from the past, present and a speculative future. With this we hope to strengthen and celebrate a general understanding of the museum’s responsibility and potential in society. We also hope to nourish and accelerate our own internal commitment to, and implementation of, the repurposing of our resources to generate processes of transformation that are urgent and crucial to our planetary longevity. 

Read more about The Butterfly Effect. https://www.nnkm.no/en/events/butterfly-effect