Outi Pieski is a Sámi visual artist from Finland. Born in Helsinki in 1973, she is the daughter of a Sámi father and a Finnish mother. She was raised in her hometown, where she attended the Visual Arts School and the Academy of Fine Arts, then continuing her studies at the Sámi Education Institute in Inari. In 2017, she was honoured with the Fine Arts Academy of Finland Award.
The main characteristic of Outi Pieski’s art is the fact that it is deeply rooted in Sámi culture. The Sámi are the traditionally Sámi-speaking indigenous people who live in the Sápmi region, which today encompasses large northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and of the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Historically, this region was known as Lapland, therefore the Sámi have long been called Lapps or Laplanders; however, these terms are regarded as offensive by the Sámi, who prefer their own endonym.
The history of the Sámi region is believed to have started as much as 3500 years ago, when a group of Uralic peoples left their homeland to arrive in the Finnish Lakeland between 1600 and 1500 BC. For long periods of time, the Sámi lifestyle thrived because of its adaptation to the Arctic environment. However, during the 19th century, the pressure of Christianization increased, with some Sámi joining Laestadianism, a pietistic Lutheran revival movement. At the same moment, with the introduction of seven compulsory years of schooling in 1889, the Sámi language and traditional way of life came increasingly under pressure from forced cultural normalization in the Norwegian territory.
The strongest pressure took place from around 1900 to 1940, when the Norwegian government invested a considerable amount of money and effort to assimilate Sámi culture. Consequently, anyone who wanted to buy or lease state lands for agriculture had to prove knowledge of the Norwegian language and to register with a Norwegian name. After World War II, this “internal” colonialist project stopped, though the legacy was evident into recent times, such as the 1970s law limiting the size of any Sámi house.
In more recent years, the controversy over the construction of the hydro-electric power station in Alta Municipality brought Sámi rights onto the political agenda. As a result, in August 1986, the national anthem and flag of the Sámi people were created; then, three years later, the first Sámi parliament was elected in Norway. Furthermore, in 2005, the Finnmark Act was passed in the Norwegian parliament, giving the Sámi parliament and the Provincial council of the region the joint responsibility of administering the land previously considered state property. Then, in the following years, the governments of Sweden and Finland followed Norway’s example and created Sámi parliaments with similar functions also in their territories.
However, despite their modern history recently took a positive turn, the Sámi are still coping with the negative consequences of language and culture loss. For this reason, they have begun to rebuild their traditional culture, for example by returning to their indigenous religion, which is composed of three intertwining elements: animism, shamanism, and polytheism. In particular, Sámi animism is manifested in the Sámi’s belief that all significant natural objects, such as animals, plants, and rocks, possess a soul. Another important initiative consisted in repatriating ceremonial and handicraft objects; in this regard, an important return was that of the skulls of two decapitated leaders of a Sámi uprising in 1852. At the same time, the Sámi are still experiencing several cultural and environmental threats, including oil exploration, mining, dam building, climate change, military bombing rangesand tourism.
As a result of what has been said so far, Outi Pieski’s art is inevitably deeply rooted in Sámi history and culture. Indeed, her artistic practice is based on the Sámi worldview, in which the spiritual and the real world coexist. Outi Pieski herself tells us this, stating: “My art is for the land, for my homeland, and for my people, the Sámi society, but I want my art to be understandable by everyone.” Consequently, some of her works draw inspiration from fundamental concepts of Sámi culture or religion, while others address the many contemporary issues her people still face today. “As Indigenous artists, Sámi artists, we are often expected to be politically active – that we are dealing and working with Sámi self-determination issues, with land right issues, and so on. In many of my works, there is a clear political meaning that is precise and exact. But the works also have a deeply personal meaning that is about my experiences, and about spirituality.”
Another fundamental aspect, essential to enter the world of Outi Pieski’s art, is the practice of the traditional Sámi craft duodji. In this regard, she argues that “duodji is a collective way of making. It is our connection to each other, to past and future generations, and to nature. For me, duodji is radical softness dealing with vulnerability, sincerity, sensitivity, and communality.” Compared to the Western way of thinking, where creativity is based on the idea of individualism, Sámi duodji practices are about collective creativity. “We hold the knowledge of the ancestors. Collective creativity is about what we have decided together and what the past generations have decided, and it follows to the next generations.” In this way, the practice of duodji goes against the individual centeredness we are living in now, and also against the hierarchical thinking.
At the same time, a final element to investigate is the concept of spirituality, which must be considered from the Sámi point of view. “I don’t really like the word spirituality, but I can’t find a better word. The Sámi perspective of seeing things is a bit different. It’s more like a worldview or philosophy. For example, really practical acts, like when you’re picking berries, taking nets from the river, or doing handicraft, are connected to spirituality; you are practicing the spirituality at the same time. Things are happening at the same time, at the same level, without hierarchies.” Focusing on the artist practice itself, Outi Pieski believes that “there is a similarity between the duodji practice and the painting practice: both of them are like rituals, a practice of healing and a way to take care of yourself and your spiritual connection.” For this reason, on one level we have landscapes, which gives a hint of a relationship of reciprocity, and of a dissolution of the inside and the outside; while the other level is the actual painting process, described by the Sámi artist as “cooking.” This is because, in Outi Pieski own words, “it’s real materials, liquids, and pigments, and it’s really nice to play together with these materials and give the material itself the opportunity to make visual choices that I then build on. When I start my paintings, there is very little that I can control. It just goes as it goes, and actually I see the result only after it has dried.”
In addition to paintings, one of the motifs of Outi Pieski’s art is textiles, which can either be used in some paintings or be the material with which she creates her installations. This is because she “sees the tassels that are on the paintings as the Sámi shawl.” For example, in the series Nuvvos Áilegas there are no actual shawls, but there is a representation of the shawl made with the tassels; this way, even though there aren’t any humans visible in the painting itself, the clothing parts “bring out the closeness, like the human is visible.” Indeed, “the clothing is the closest thing to your body. You are covered with the textile and it’s really intimate, so that is also a reason why I want to use it in the painting. To bring this intimate connection with the land.” Furthermore, another dimension that the landscapes painted by Outi Pieski represent can be understood by looking at Sámi vocal tradition of joiking. “When you are joiking for someone or something, a person or a place, we do not say you are describing the person or place, but you’re making that person or place come alive in that moment, in that space and time. I think of paintings in a similar way, they don’t describe the landscape but make it come alive in that moment or space.”
Moving on to the more socially committed aspect of Outi Pieski’s work, some of her works have titles from legal texts. This is because she is interested in the idea of the “guardian of nature.”; in fact, in some countries, such as Aotearoa/New Zealand and Ecuador, certain rivers or mountains have been given the same legal rights as humans. In this regard, she argues that “maybe this could be of help also in the Sámi areas where we are fighting against the industrial land use”. For instance, the works titled “Sacred Mountain Rástegáisá as a Legal Person” are connected to Norway, where the government is planning to build gigantic wind parks, many of which in Sámi areas, and some in the most important places for reindeer herding. In particular, one of the wind parks is planned for the Rástegáisá mountain area, considered to be the most holy mountain in this whole Deatnu river region. Consequently, she decided to use pieces from Sámi women’s jewellery and the tassels from the shawl in the paintings, in order to make visible that the Mountain Rástegáisá also has rights, like people do. Obviously, this idea is based on the Sámi perspective that humans do not exist above nature, but are in a position of mutual dependence, as we coexist with all living beings in reciprocal respect. Therefore, nature is viewed as an interconnected system, where all beings, both visible and invisible, are related and reliant upon one another.
Another project recently created by the Sámi artist, in collaboration with Finnish researcher Eeva-Kristiina Nylander, represents/takes as subjects the ládjogahpir, horn-like shaped hats that were used by women between the 1750s and the turn of the twentieth century. These hats were forbidden by Laestadianism, whose followers claimed that the devil lived in the fierra, the horn. As a result, many ládjogahpirat are now situated in museums where they are presented as objects in ethnographic collections. For this reason, Eeva-Kristiina and Outi Pieski came together to try to find new ways to make ládjogahpir hats live again. They called it “craftivism.”,meaning they used these objects as a very important tool for how they “talk together about difficult issues and the intergenerational traumas and experiences that every Sámi woman has.” The photographic work about the ládjogahpir consists of the “47 most wanted foremothers”, referring to Andy Warhol’s piece with the 13 most wanted men. “We wanted to show how these hats are like prisoners in museums all around the world, lacking power and meaning. But when you let them come together it becomes powerful. We want to mass-produce ládjogahpir hats in the future”.
To wrap up, Outi Pieski’s works serve as a powerful bridge between the ancestral past and the political present of the Sámi people. We have seen how her art is inseparable from the land of Sápmi, drawing from the collective creativity of duodji and the spiritual echoes of the joik. From the intimate connection of textile tassels representing the human presence to the “craftivism” of reclaiming the ládjogahpir hats, her practice confronts the scars of colonialism and Christianization. By advocating for the legal rights of sacred nature, like the Rástegáisá mountain, Pieski transforms museums into sites of resistance and cultural rebirth. For this reason, our invitation is to go and see her works in person, which you can find in prestigious permanent collections, including the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland. This way, you will have the opportunity to see magnificent artworks that will immerse you in the world of the Sámi, thus discovering, and hopefully loving, the incredible culture of an indigenous population whose history is rooted in the land where they have lived for millennia.
My name is Luca Buzzo, and I was born and raised in Genoa. When I was 18, after obtaining a scientific high school diploma, I decided to move to Milan to study at Bocconi University. Currently, I am pursuing a master's degree in Economics and Management in Arts, Culture, Media, and Entertainment (ACME). My interests span across multiple fields but the one I am most interested in are Visual arts, Culture and heritage, Museum studies, Asian studies (in particular China and Hong Kong), Social dynamics and Identity studies.
