In this podcast, Radio Web MACBA talks with Eva Maria Fjellheim. Eva Maria takes a close, personal experience—a photograph of her great-grandmother from her family album—as a point of departure to unpack the racist and colonial logics that gave rise to the stigma attached to Saami identity, and the prejudices that remain latent today. We talk about epistemicide, strategic ignorance and green colonialism, about ancestral practices that outlast us, and about the territory as a body. And we see how age-old Saami defiance and resilience can still use imaginative tactics to resist and reject the slow violence of a silent and silenced piecemeal dispossession.

Eva Maria Fjellheim is a southern Saami researcher at the Arctic University of Norway. Her research focuses on indigenous peoples’ rights, with an emphasis on the study of “green colonialism”: a land-grabbing strategy legitimized by hegemonic climate change policies that perpetuate relations of domination and coloniality.

Drawing on her knowledge of the disputes and movements of Latin American indigenous peoples and on the five-generation struggle in the Sápmi region, Eva Maria concentrates on the case of Fosen in Norway: reindeer-herding lands that are vital to the Saami people and integral to their migratory routes, their culture, their way of life and their relationship with nature. These lands are being targeted by extractive projects driven by corporate and government interests, and are in the process of being turned into wind energy plants. Eva Maria has been accompanying the legal action in the Fosen case, which pits a community of reindeer herders against a wind energy company and the Norwegian government. In view of the asymmetrical nature of the dialogue in the court cases, Fjellheim explores the epistemic conflict through which corporate science silences voices and forms of knowledge contrary to colonial, capitalist and extractivist interests.

This podcast is a co-production between Ràdio Web MACBA and BEK.

Listen via Radio Web MACBA