Featured image: Susanne Haetta
Joar Nango is a Sámi artist, architect and filmmaker whose work moves between architecture and art. I spoke with Nango about his Sámi background, architectural training, approaches to space and material, and his work with moving images. I conducted this interview with Nango in English on 14 July and 1 September 2017, via Skype. I was in St. John’s, NL and Toronto, ON, respectively. Nango was in Tromsø on both occasions.
I: Context
Mark David Turner: Which part of Sápmi do you come from?
Joar Nango: I’m one of the generations of Sami artists that have grown up, or I’ve been raised, outside of the Sami sort of core area. My father is from an area called Máze it’s a small village that is in the Kautokeino/Guovdageaidnu region which is the inner parts of Finnmark, a region in northern Norway. So, this is the one place in the world where Sami people are a majority. My father’s roots and my Sami family roots is in the reindeer herding culture of the inland mountain Sami area. So, that’s where I have my Sami roots. I’ve grown up, though, in a village that’s on the coast in the same area and in another little bit bigger town further south on the west coast of Norway where my mother is from. My roots in the Sami culture are somewhat multifaceted, you could say. I’ve grown up in a city and I have also been from early age involved in Sami politics. At the age of sixteen I was already – even if I was living in a more peripheral area, or geography – I was starting to engage myself in Sami politics as a youth representative of a political organization. Me and my father actually started the first Sami political association in a small town on the west coast of Norway. So, I was always kind of attached to my Sami roots, even if I was somehow raised outside of the core area.
MDT: Were there tensions between Sami living within the territory and Sami living outside of the territory? Was that a defining part of growing up?
JN: Not while growing up. I think this story around my family is quite complex and my father belongs to what you could call – he’s one representative of the lost generation. He was also taken out of this village and raised in a village very close by, which is a coastal Sami village. He was also raised with this complex kind of belonging or relation to his Sami roots and Sami family. This is something that is not uncommon and is part of the colonial heritage. In a sense, I like to skip those sort of stories of trauma and rather just explain my background as a young Sami that’s raised with the cultural heritage that bears with itself a lot of traumas. I usually explain it like I kind of inherited these traumas brought on to my people from colonization. Even if I was raised outside of it, it was still something that was very present in that part of me that part of my identity, the Sami-ness. Even if you grow up in the more southwestern parts of Norway there are still a lot of pre-judgemental racism embedded in the Norwegian majority culture towards Samis.
The word that we used for our self was used by other people used as a negative kind of condescending word you use when you want to throw shit at someone, which was the word that I was. That’s how we describe ourselves. In junior high school there was like some kind of established ideal about the Sami people as something negative, or, something you were not supposed to be, or, something with lesser value. Alongside gay, I remember. Either you were gay or you were Sami. You know, these kinds of words you could easily throw around you as if they meant something negative.
I think it’s an important part of the story. The colonial reality of Samis in Norway is something that all Norwegians are kind of connected to, or, a part of. Even if you’re down south it doesn’t mean that the history doesn’t count there. It’s the same nation-state and it’s the same institutional, structural violence that creates the problem. At that time, of course, I was aware of it and I was in my own maybe silly ways trying to counteract it by standing up for myself. But now looking back on it, it’s really crazy to think about: how these sort of racist structures finds its way into society and how everyone, even the smartest, most generous, kind people are still somehow convinced or affected by this way of speaking. I hope it’s about to change. I think it’s changing. But it’s still here.
MDT: As difficult as that was as an upbringing, it sounds like it allowed you to cultivate a unique form of awareness. To be raised outside of Sápmi, and to be aware of colonial and racist attitudes outside of Sápmi, did that change your idea of outside of Sápmi is?
JN: I’m not sure. I think a part of the reality also involves being raised in-between cultures. But that’s a kind of a choice you can make on your own terms. If you want to describe yourself as being in two worlds at the same time, or, if you want to describe yourself as being in-between, in either of these worlds. Having one foot in each culture somehow gives you a lot of advantage. But at the same time it leaves you a little bit detached. I think that this kind of perspective of being in certain circumstances: in both places or in both worlds; then another circumstance you’re in between it somehow. I think it leaves you with some kind of a shape shifter potential, or, something like that. You can, according to the situation, maybe relate to things more independently.
These kinds of topics are also for me very relevant in terms of my education, being both an architect and an artist; or, not an architect nor an artist. And that there’s something about being released from categories, or, being somehow not really suitable to fit into these kind of categories. It somehow leaves you really, really vulnerable coming to Kautokeino, where I don’t speak Sami well enough to kind of be one of them. But, at the same time I’m from their blood and everybody knows it, my last name, everybody knows my relatives. I’m very welcome but still, I’m not really sort of from there in the same sense. But at the same time when I go to Norwegian society, I am also Sami and there is something that I miss in the way that this culture somehow kind of thinks about itself. It lacks something from me. I cannot really identify with it. It’s something within the awareness, or, the evasiveness towards the Norwegian state colonial history that I find really, really problematic and difficult to deal with. I cannot be Norwegian because there’s something in me that carries these stories of colonization and trauma that I’ve experienced from me and my fathers and my father’s families. It’s so present when I’m here and these are direct consequences of the Norwegian state. It’s a very complex thing to be stuck in-between these two worlds. But at the same time as it is a difficult thing, it can be somehow an advantage in certain ways. I do believe that for an artistic expression, this freedom of movement or this sort of in-between position taking, it can really offer us a lot. It can give you other, less politicized, less static representations of what it means to be a human being in this world and perhaps and hopefully create another kind of understanding of how we came to this, or, how we Samis also are a really huge and diverse group of people with a lot of different histories and perspectives and feelings about what it means to be Indigenous, for example.
MDT: Did existing in that space lead you to your practice as an architect and as an artist?
JN: Yes, definitely. I think so because that’s a much more easy story to somehow talk about. I wanted to be an artist and I went to arts studies for three years after high school and then I shifted to architecture for different reasons. I have a five-year long master education, professional education in architecture. And during these studies I was attending Norwegian institutions. They were all Norwegian curriculums. For example, during architecture studies we were taught about Norwegian architectural history, right. It’s in the constitution, it says that Norway is a country founded on two cultures: Norwegian and Sami culture. And in architectural history class, we were taught hours after hours after hours about Norwegian architecture, stave churches, wooden architecture and coastal cultural sort of building typologies, a lot of things. There was a section about Sami architectural history, but I remember us skipping it. It was only one out of six-hundred pages in the history book and it was in a very, very superficial way referring to some kind of – the most simple, iconographically shaped buildings that we have, that we had. I was, I remember, feeling super disappointed and kind of very troubled by that moment in architectural history class when someone, Norwegian architect historians were telling us about the Sami architecture and just sort of, basically, flipping the page in that kind of “not so,” in a humble or in a polite way.
That moment, it really made me aware of being Sami and also how educational systems work and all these hidden colonial structures that we have to deal with. And I thought “Okay,” when we came to the point in education where we were doing our master’s thesis and we could choose topics our self and for me there was no way around it, I wanted to do something about Sami architecture. I wanted to really investigate it and I did so for a year. My master’s thesis as an architect was a deliberate reaction to exactly what we just talked about: this trying to make some kind of a bridge between these two worlds that I felt within the architectural institution I was at was a wasteland. It was like a big dark gap in history, in a way. Because I knew there was so much interesting architectural concepts laying there. But they were not investigated from an architectural perspective. It was very superficial in the way that it was presented. And it was also very exotifying. It was only looking at what was different between the Sami architecture and the Norwegian architecture. I was also a bit provoked by that. Why can’t we also own some of this universal kind of architectural concept that all cultures throughout the world history have used? So, that was my project. It was to somehow dive into the history, the traditional architecture and look for architectural potential that could somehow be interesting for contemporary architectural work. I was looking at, for example, how heat was distributed. I was looking at the light-weight structures, materials. I found a lot of really amazing things and of course the nomadism became maybe the most interesting sort of architectural category to really dive deep into because there’s so much amazing craft technology. There’s so much amazing material resourcefulness when it comes to building and thinking that it’s really, it’s amazing. I am so proud of it, of course. It was really interesting for me to dive into that part of our history.
At the same time, I also didn’t want to look only backwards and into our historical roots, I also wanted to look into our contemporary world. So, I did at this parallel to this historical research, I also did research on the built environment and I looked particularly at two things. One was through an anthropological lens, using [Pierre] Bourdieu’s idea about habitus, and looking at how basically people live and how we arrange the borders of our house, our idea of home or the extended home which is habitus. The other was to look at significant cultural, spatial, architectural, visual markers that could be interesting that could serve to become interesting approaches. For example, to try to dissect colonial history or to look at how the sort of new forms of living forcefully. Maybe not always forcefully, but in some cases forcefully put on top of our culture. I look at more the built environment. And then I was traveling a lot in the villages and also, of course, just living with my aunt and living in her house and looking at how she works. She’s a traditional craftsman. She has been living from sewing: a seamstress. So, she taught me a lot about these things and how she harvests from the immediate nature to produce her materials.
At the same time, I also did research on a third topic, which was more looking at actually the more institutional architecture that was built alongside the growth of the modern Sami nation since the ’60s. There have been a lot of Sami institutions, museums, parliament building, cultural houses, different kind of architectural buildings that are built and designed for the Sami culture. So, I was looking at how the architects have been identifying the Sami-ness or how are they have been trying to deliberately incorporate that kind of Sami aesthetic or Sami-ness to their building, either through the use of rhetorics, through material choices, or form elements as well. And, of course, the latter phenomenon where it became quite obvious for me that there was a lot of architects that, while designing for Sami culture, have been kind of looking backwards into time and they found this the most easily identifiable and the most recognizable architectural shape, which is the lavvu, of course. So, I discovered that there were ten, twenty, thirty, forty different institutional buildings where the architects basically have built giant lavvus. They’ve taken this like ancient, symbolic, very recognizable form and put that on top of an otherwise quite conventional, normal, modern, traditional kind of architecture. So, you have now this typology of giant lavvu buildings throughout the Sami region, which I like to call a syndrome, a giant lavvu syndrome. That was some kind of an infectionist way of thinking about architecture in a very simplistic form. And it’s a bit insulting as an architect to see this silly, simple way of dealing with identity and architecture. It can be so much more and it’s also insulting us as a Sami to see this one sort of iconic symbol being reproduced and reproduced and reproduced until it’s become some kind of almost like a Disneyland in a way. For me, these were important things to create discourse around. So, instead of leaving all this research and my observations, all the stuff I found, instead of leaving it into some kind of thesis forgotten in a dusty library, I made a magazine out of it. I made this periodical and I released towards the end of my diploma thesis. It’s called Sami Huksendaidda which means “the Sami art of building”.
MDT: Was there a through-line between your political commitments and what led you to study architecture in the first place?
JN: I say both yes and no on this. It’s a very complex thing for me to answer because even if I was politically engaged, I would also say that I was kind of politically crippled. It wasn’t a big success, my political career. I have a lot of initiative. That’s maybe one of my biggest strengths is that I start things, or I get ideas on my own, I do things or create things and get all the people involved in it. So, I was involved in making that political organization with my father which was, it was just a fraction, a part, sub-part of another bigger thing that was already existing. I was just kind of engaged in it and it led me to involve myself in the youth political organization of the biggest Sami political party, basically. I wasn’t really equipped for it. I’m not a politician. I’m filled with doubts and I have a little bit of stage fright and I’m not so comfortable being the sort of epicentre of the discourse. I think I’m too soaked in doubt to really be a politician. If you mean one thing and then all of sudden that means you have to mean something else about something else as well. All these things just like accumulate for me and in the end, I feel a bit paralyzed by having very strong opinions about things. I’m much more interested in other forms of conversation or discourse. Also, when I moved to Oslo after my high school, doing art studies, I was also involved in starting another political youth organizations from the south, the young people, young Samis of the south political organization or something like this, with some other students. But also, here, the same experience occurred. I felt I’m not a politician, even if I wanted to be part of this environment and communal energies and sharing. But I just can’t see myself as a politician. So, I guess that creating my own magazine, being the editor and the printmaker and the financier and the writer and the photographer in one and the same, you know, somehow fits me better.
MDT: What was your motivation to study architecture in addition to art?
JN: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it was during art school working with sculpture, working with three dimensions. Then, also, coincidences happen. You know, I actually didn’t get into the art academy. I applied to get into the art academy and didn’t get in. And then I went one year just working with this really horrible job as a telephone salesman. I don’t know if you ever done that but that’s the lowest position you can have in society. You’re sitting there, disturbing people in their dinners asking for their time with no particular reason and you’re not even engaged yourself. It’s really like selling your credibility. And for someone maybe interested in discourse, it’s like a suicide. I really didn’t want to have another year of that because all my friends were studying, and I was going doing these shitty jobs. And then I didn’t get accepted to art academy again the second time applying. Then I went to the architecture school, which was the best thing that ever happened to me because a lot of artists sort of struggle with their lack of direction in not only education but also later on in life. I’m so happy that I have this sort of foundational knowledge, which I was taught through a school of architecture. That practical side to it is something I really admire, I really like it and I’m not afraid of it. Art can sometimes be very disillusioning because you really looking at yourself to a level where it can be way too much. It gets more sort of self-obsessive than anything else, the art world. I’m really happy that I was rejected by the art schools and that I was accepted by architecture. Coincidences. But also, I was working with three-dimensional installations while being an art student before doing architecture. I wasn’t applying for architecture because I didn’t care I was applying for architecture because that could also be a potential option for me.
MDT: These three concerns that you developed during your master’s work, do these carry on? Are these the defining concerns than of your work as an artist-practitioner afterwards? Or have some of these become reconfigured?
JN: They are still with me and they are reconfigured continuously. But as I told you, the perspective where I look at the representation of Sami culture through architecture, the institutional architecture, the methodologies in use by architecture, outsider architects when designing for a Sami culture, that led me to, for example, creating different art works where representation and self-representation are evaluated or discussed in a different sense. The sweaters is one of these works. Another work is a series of pants that I made from this old discarded lavvu materials: the tent fabric, which is also kind of connected a little bit the same kind of playful rearrangement of architectural elements from one scale to another. Then while looking through this built environment and Sami homes of the north, I’ve been discovering a lot of interesting phenomena. And one of them became very aware in the research I did on the Sami Garden. So, the garden around the Sami houses in all different Sami areas is a place for use. It’s a very functional space that is a very clear indicator of a culture that still are mixing work and home. It’s an overlapping kind of thing. You don’t sort of leave your house to go to work and then you come home to this recreational garden where you have to move the lawn and put out garden furniture and a barbecue thing. It’s a garden that is used for preparing wood, preparing your boats, your cars. It’s a very, very pragmatic, utilitarian space, the Sami garden, and it’s all connected to the cultural aspect of nature-use. Man and nature being somehow – we’re still harvesting. We’re still thinking about our nature surrounding us as a resource. So, as a consequence of this Sami Garden, I found this particular phenomenon which is, I described as some kind of an attitude, a cultural attitude, which I like to call the ‘competence of improvisation’. I also have described it as the ‘Indigenuity’. It’s a word play of indigenousness and ingenuity and how there exists this ingenious, resourceful, creative way of building: building out of recycled materials, thinking smart and fast when a problem occurs. It’s basically DIY problem-solving. It has so many words and so many descriptions to it. You see this phenomenon everywhere in the world. It’s kind of a global thing. But in particular, in the northern Sami areas, you see a really, really, really high presence of this attitude. I like to think of it as an attitude. And it’s an attitude that, you know, can serve as a really, really amazing source of inspiration, as for designer. It’s somehow an anti-design were the designer and the user are the same. It’s in many ways also suggesting that the designer is surplus. In other ways, it’s also very anti- or maybe post-capitalistic way of shaping and thinking. And that’s also something I see very, very – in very many other cases or places. It’s really something that occurs when the systems crash, this Mad Max aesthetics, or, living in Athens for the last half-year, you see a lot of this. The economy collapsed. What do you do? You have to use whatever is there. It’s really forcing the human mind into a more immediate kind of creativity. And I think that this way of being in the world and this way of sort of juggling materials, this way of seeing the world around you as a resource bank is something very, very important and fascinating and very distinct and special for the northern Sami communities. Then I start traveling the world going to the first reserves I visited was in Mi’kmaq reserves in Cape Breton I went to six different reserves there and I saw exactly the same thing. Here’s a culture that every house has some kind of an old trashy car outside. And these cars and of course they’re spare part cars, or, they’re cars that were supposed to be fixed. They have a kind of a purpose or a history. They also describe a lesser concern with what the neighbour thinks about the length of your lawn, the grass on your lawn. It’s another kind of aesthetic, an aesthetic of necessity. It’s a deeply-rooted philosophy, I think, that you’ve really got to know the culture in order to sort of identify things. That brings you into another sort of anthropological kind of source of material as well. You know, Mary Douglas, for example is a British sociologist from the ’60s-’70s, wrote the book Purity and Danger. She says trash is matter out of place, which is also something that I think really relates to this, kind of, this discourse concerning materialities. When Norwegian people travel through Kautokeino or the area were in my father’s family lives, they are usually shocked by the amount of trash that’s around the houses. But it’s not trash, this is not trash. It’s resources and it’s something that their self-obsessed eyes are not able to identify. These kind of things are really interesting for me and I’ve been working with this particular topic ever since 10 years ago. I’ve done numerous projects on them, I have built this huge photo archive which is called “A Temporary Solution for Something Else”.
II: Space
MDT: Has the competency of improvisation always existed in Sami architectural practice? You have spoken about it as a reactionary strategy in other parts of the world but in Norway, is it a form of resistance?
JN: I once wrote a text for the Oslo Architectural Triennalle, where I was invited to write about sort of Sami architecture. Then I got a little bit kind of fed up by their expectations of what I was supposed to write about. I ended up writing a text that is called the Third Space or Golmmat Avus in Sami language which is very inspired by this sort of de-colonial theory, I guess. But that’s something I maybe find out later because at that time I didn’t really reference anything. I was more thinking about the necessity of creating autonomous platform for us as Indigenous people to discuss or create discussions about ourselves, on ourselves, with ourselves, for ourselves. So, to create some kind of an internal awareness around what architecture is and also not only what architecture is, but how architecture can be used to serve a greater purpose in the great battle of decolonizing. So, this Third Space was a bit simplistic perhaps but kind of a take on exactly this, where I was deliberately drawing in some historical examples dating back to the ’70s. One example was taken from the [Aboriginal] Tent Embassy which is a magnificent, very interesting kind of public space demonstration, occupational public space, demonstration project from Canberra in Australia from ’72. Some Indigenous-Aboriginal activists occupied a space on the lawn in front of the parliament building, making banners, pitching up tents, using this kind of Indigenous, nomadic, very simple, fleeting, ephemeral architectural expression to construct some kind of aesthetic of resistance. That became a very conscious contrast to this monumental parliament building design with all this historical, role model, in stone, and with Greek big columns. It’s like very, very monumental institutionalized aesthetics contrasting this fleeting, sort of opposing, demonstration: Indigenous resistance architecture. That became, for me, some kind of very interesting starting point to discuss the needs for these kinds of spaces. These anti-monumental spaces that are constructed more based around social needs, or, more on sort of cultural-political needs. Claiming these kinds of spaces are so important and they become so important as a tool for bridging our voices, or, for visualizing our voices, or, to facilitate our concerns in a way. So, that was very interesting way of sort of starting to talk about architecture, to look at this particular example. And then I bridged that phenomenon into another project which happened in 1979 in Oslo where a group of Sami activists were occupying the lawn in front of the Norwegian parliament building, pitching traditional Sami lavuu, and arranging a hunger strike in opposition – also in this case – to the state’s controlled initiation initiative, or, proposal to damn up a large river in the Sami traditional area: putting a whole village underwater, the village where my father is from. The visual archival material from newspapers and TV reports from this period is amazing and to see how efficient this contrasting, aesthetic and architectural elements, they’re so functional as something connected to another depth or something. I think that this really talks about history in a way. You know, we’re showing that we’re still here and we’re also in one way by pitching up these tents we’re also somehow illustrating not our weakness but maybe our humbleness, or, our invisibility, or, our fragility perhaps. I’m not sure.
MDT: And maybe it also illustrates your relationship with space. In these cases, it seems what you are describing is reaffirming traditional uses of space by way of architecture.
JN: I think there’s so many spaces which we as Indigenous artists are invited into where sort of the control of it is not really ours and I think that these spaces are somehow an illustration of that. In order to make ourselves heard, we need to create these spaces. This is how fragile these spaces sometimes appear and that illustrates which kind of situation we’re in.
MDT: Does this inform your idea of nomadism? That is a theme that runs through your work. Now seems like a good time to unpack that concept a little bit in light of these examples.
JN: I think that the word nomadism is in itself quite a generic, universal word that can be programmed in very many different ways depending on the perspective of the person possessing the word or using the word. But, for me, I think I have this kind of dual relationship to it. One way of thinking about it is through quite a historical and traditional lens where I link my references and my understanding of it to a more traditional lifestyle and to a reindeer-herding, nomadic way of really, really being on the land. Many people tend to use the word nomadism as something detached from the land, detached from the context while looking. But if you look at the historical way of nomadic life in the region where I’m from, where my family is from, it’s the absolutely opposite. It’s something extremely dependant on the land. It’s something extremely relational and dependant on a specific geography. The only difference is that it’s stretched out over kind of a bigger territory. So, that really defines my understanding of nomadism, as something that when I take this kind of thoughts into a contemporary art practice leaves me with nomadism as being the ultimate site-specific expression. It’s site-specificity per se. It’s like the essence of site-specificity. It’s something that really, really relates to the land and the context that I work within, that I engage with. But the difference between it and other ways of relating to context and sites is that it has maybe a very kind of immediate past. That it time-wise is maybe not so conserved. It has an awareness of its ephemerality. It’s a self-consciousness in it that once you enter a site you also are aware that you’re going to leave that site. So, there’s something in that way of dealing with the surface, and way of dealing with the materiality, and way of dealing with the land and the geography and the weather and the wind that somehow leaves you more humble. Maybe that’s a too pretentious thing to say, but it leaves you more not detached, because that’s not the right word. But it leaves you somehow – you don’t think about foundations, or, it’s another kind of monumental-less way of thinking.
We have a saying in Sami about ourselves where we say that “we Samis, we are people without shoe soles”. We are the people without shoe soles. And I think that this somehow also reflects this attitude, in a way. If you look at our architecture, none of our architecture has foundations. It’s impermanence. That’s a better word. That’s maybe the word I was looking for. There’s this impermanence in the way we enter or relate or mould our surroundings. That is something that I find also very important to sort of think about. And that leads me back to a bit where we were earlier on, where I was talking about an attitude, right? I think nomadism is an attitude. I think it’s a way of thinking. It’s not an aesthetic, it’s not a form, it’s not a recipe, it’s not the way of doing, it’s not even a skill set. It’s action-attitude. It’s a way of thinking about yourself in relation to your context. It’s not ecological, necessarily. I sometimes feel it’s such a romantic idea to think about this nomadic culture is respectful to the land. Yeah, of course, maybe this way of thinking or this attitude implies that. Yes, I think it does very often. But often it doesn’t at all, also. It’s another sort of way of just, of being in the world, which also deals with, it deals with this movement, it deals with this impermanence towards sight, and also deals with time. It deals with the rhythm of time being much more organized by land, weather, weather conditions, shifting weather conditions, seasonal weather shifts. And, of course, it also has been strongly related to animals, to the way animal moves. And the way the animal moves, you know, that’s not a predictable thing always, also.
So, there’s all these contextual parameters that are set in terms of time, which still exists even if we don’t live like that anymore. It still exists, a lot of things remaining from these things in our language, in our way of existing. Maybe that’s not the way of defining what I think about when I say nomadic space, but it for sure is something that I think is important in terms of that. That’s my of personal more Sami way of thinking about that term. If I take another approach to it, I could also go straight to the post-structuralist way of using the word with [Gilles] Deleuze and [Félix] Guattari. Talking about their ways of metaphorically using it as a word that describes resistance, that describes the sort of the anti-shift, the complex-evasive-constant search for smoothness and rhizometric kind of organizational structures. That’s another way which it fascinates me a lot. I think reading A Thousand Plateaus is like an artwork. It’s poetry in sort of a philosophical sense and I like it. I really love it. I can really understand where they found this kind of inspiration through using that kind of ethnographic lens and using the nomad and making the nomad or nomadism as some kind of a role model for this sort of anti-establishment, or, the revolution, or, the war machine, it’s like I understand it. It’s a visual, very juicy concept. I think that’s very valid also in an art very direct architectural way also.
MDT: What strikes me about these approaches to nomadism is that it suggests a slightly different relationship to the land, one more defined by the passage of time than by timelessness. You seem to describe the experience of time as a function of weather, rhythm, structure, or, even texture.
JN: I try to avoid using the word cyclic or circular. I think people can very often sort of fall into clichés when that kind of holisticness is addressed. I’m trying to avoid it a bit. But there is something about the different time frequencies and the different time structures that are embedded within what I’m speaking about. It’s not linear in a way. It has another looping, kind of structure or configuration where you will sort of always end up at the same place where you are, in a way. That, I think, does somehow exist out of time or it makes you somehow aware of – I don’t know. It makes eternity into something different when you know next year you’re going to do, have to do it the same. It creates an awareness where the idea of evolution, and the idea of progress, and these kind of big topics that I feel that capitalism very often works within. They’re not really valid in the same way. Of course, we also believe in progress and evolution. But when you think about it, this rhythm and this awareness of this rhythm, I think you have to be aware of what you leave behind in another way because you know you’re going to go back there. It’s, I don’t know. This is difficult.
MDT: What you seem to be describing are a variety of awarenesses that are happening at the same time. There is a broader idea of linearity, not necessarily circularity but linearity, that’s mapped out in a geographical way rather than some kind of an abstract cyclical way. That linearity coexists with something larger than the individual. And that those two understandings are themselves fundamentally linked to that intimate awareness and attitude.
JN: I think we kind of need to reclaim the word linearity, to reinvent another form of linearity, like what you’re suggesting now. I think I feel now we’re really into some kind of a bit of geometrical sort of, kind of web or something. It’s interesting to sort of think about points in the landscape or nexuses and then lines between these and different ways of moving between these points in the landscape. Both in heights and in time and like physical space and in seasonal perspectives. I think that this way of moving is, of course, we could use – it’s like more rhizometric. Maybe not. Maybe that’s also the completely wrong word in this sense because – but there’s something with that sort of the movement in landscape. It’s another kind of geometry, at least.
It doesn’t contain the cyclic-cycle that I think we are looking for in terms of describing this particular nomadic pattern. There is a simplicity to this also. There is a very, very simple down-to-earth kind of necessity in this. And that’s something I really love and that’s where I really get sort of fascinated by my own culture. It’s this tendency of very, very pragmatic, everyday life concerns to meet this very, very philosophical, mythological, or religious even, kind of world. When they overlap it’s very, very fascinating. I think that there are a lot of these things in our culture where sometimes things are described as very mythological, or, spiritual. But in the end, they’re just based on super pragmatic everyday practical things. Like the way you walk into a lavvu: how you walk in there and how you’re supposed to behave in the lavvu. It has this connection to our Gods and where the Gods live inside the lavvu. In the fireplace and in the sort of entrance zone and in the kitchen area, there are these Gods that inhabit these places and you’re told not to be very afraid of them and behave in a particular way to not upset them. Basically, this kind of behaviour is just super practical. It’s to keep the space clean and to avoid fire to start. It’s just super practical and then it’s connected to this mythological world where you know the outsiders that come in, and they’re looking for all this spirituality. Of course, that’s what the story ends up becoming. While from a very lived space, a special sort of experience, these things are just like they’re just so obvious. Of course, you don’t want people to step over the kitchen. Of course, you don’t want to. That’s where your food is. You don’t want to have sand in your meat when you eat. But then, of course, when outsiders come, they’re that you’re not stop over the kitchen area because there is a God that lives there and if you do that your reindeer cubs are going to die. These things, I think they’re kind of fascinating to see and there’s many similar historical concepts where mythology and pragmatism are just sort of meeting each other and not always the same way either but I think it’s fascinating.
MDT: Is there a distinction between nomadic space and nomadic architecture?
JN: For me, the definition of space is something that encompasses more and something that’s connected to our existence as individuals and as well as a culture. I think that’s the term nomadic space. Somehow, it’s very interesting on that level because basically nomadism means to move through a landscape or move through space and I think that something quite existential occurs when you live on those terms. When you live a long difference, or, live through a line in geography or a line in the landscape, moving between different geographical places and different places. I think that those ways that you’re forced to act and behave and think, moving like that, are extremely interesting on many levels. I think they’re quite interesting in terms of the way you relate to materials and resources around you. How you are forced to think more sensitive and fast and maybe that has some kind of ephemerality that you’re forced to sort of build your world with. It has this kind of a light footstep. And it also triggers another way of seeing a potential in things around you. It’s about actually unravelling. It’s a different way of seeing and maybe spotting potential of things that are already existing, new ways of using things. It’s a certain sense of creative attitudes. It’s a certain sense of problem-solving skill. It’s a certain sense of ability to construct with a lesser means and get more for the money. It’s functionalism, in a sense, and it’s also a very pragmatic, not nostalgic way of creating surroundings and creating space, organizing space. That sort of existentialism is very interesting, I always thought. And it has a lot of poetry within it as well, I think. When it comes to architecture, I think of nomadic architecture as something that’s more of a physical outcome of such a way of building, or, constructing, or, basically just being in space.
I think it’s very interesting to think about this sort of way of thinking in terms of control, or, in terms of organization and planning. Definitely, I think that there’s something about the coincidental or the occasional. There’s a word called tilfeldigin Norwegian. I don’t know what it would be in English. “Coincidental,” I think, is the word. There’s something about the coincidental and uncontrollable – that way of actually thinking about yourself as an extension of your surroundings, or, seeing yourself as am extension of the surroundings. And that somehow also invites the designer as a creator of space to also see yourself as more of an elastic unity. That yourself, as a designer, you’re thinking in more flexible terms and you see yourself as something that also shapes yourself and your behaviour according to the context and the site specificity.
I think that this connects to what we talked about earlier with Deleuze and Guattari and their dichotomical model betweenstriated space and smooth space, where smooth space somehow represents something uncontrolled and something elastic and rhizometric. While striated spaces are controlled, defined and somehow, in those terms, also represent the opposite. So, I think that this idea of smooth space as some kind of flowing, open-ended, elastic environment, it’s very, very appealing and interesting. You know it’s interesting as a model for me, as an artist to work with it. But it’s also really interesting for my anthropological gaze to actually spot this in my own culture and to spot this not only in my own culture but also everywhere. It’s not only nomad culture that has this, it’s also within in an urban environment for example or travelling to big third-world cities, for example. Suburbs of the Colombian Bogota, or, in Guatemala City you see there’s a lot of favela and slum settlements that operates a lot within those quite similar terms. This, kind of, this environment that force people to think more flexible, elastic and see potential in things, as well.
III: Media
MDT: This is a good way to approach Nomads Won’t Stand Still for Their Portraits. Between the book and the film, I see a tension between what I perceive as nomadic architecture captured in urban space.
JN: That’s a really good bridge in a way to that project and also to where this is going to take us to the film production itself. I think that, in terms of this sort of gaze and this almost fetishized interest of mine, discovering what I like to call the competence of improvisation. You see it a lot within different Indigenous cultures, especially Northern cultures, living often in the land. You see this you know capacity to improvise within the culture with low amount of resources within harsh, fast-shifting climates. You have to think fast, and you have to be able to solve problems with little, due to the scarcity of the environment. So, you see this in Sami culture and in Inuit culture, a lot of interesting kind of cultural skill sets, survival skill you might call them even, at some point. But you also see them in the way that basic constructions of these cultures. And you see it in Mongolia, also. I’ve been, for many years, mapping these kinds of examples through different projects like the Indigenuity Project.
This project is basically a photographic, anthropological project that maps these kind of examples through photography and text from all over the Sami area. So, I’ve been travelling and taking photos of this really DIY, often quite humorous but very, very creative cultural appropriation and inventions of the Sami people. You know, where people have made ski-doo sledges from old Euro-Pallets. Where people have made a water heater out of broken ovens, or, a barbecue out of an old baby stroller. You know, there’s all this kind of interesting re-programming of objects and very inventive design. It has become a design typology for me and I’ve been mapping this a lot and I’ve been writing texts about it and I’ve been inviting other people to write texts about it and make exhibitions. So, when I’ve been travelling the world, I also sort of, I brought this gaze with me and I found some examples in other geographies that are very, very similar. And it has started for me to appear, this sort of circumpolar northern design phenomenon, which I like to call the ‘Indigenuity’.
So, when I first heard about the Mongolian ger settlements, I realized that this definitely would be a place for me to visit, where these phenomenons would be able to for me to observe within a more urban context. The ger settlements are basically suburbs of the big Mongolian capital, Ulaanbaatar, where people from the Mongolian steppe landscape are giving up their nomadic lives, moving into the city, bringing with them what they have which is the yurt, the portable Mongolian tent and basically creating, or, settling down within the suburbs, the outskirts of the city – ger is the Mongolian word for yurt – creating these sort of settlements with these tents. What’s been happening since the 90s, since the fall of communism, as everywhere in the world, urbanization is exploding. People are moving from the land, people are moving to the cities, the cities are growing. I think it’s estimated that in ten or twenty years, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities, meaning that the rural population is declining, the urban sort of centres are booming: urban growth, sprawl. When I heard about this example from Mongolia, I was very fascinated because this would obviously be a very interesting architectural phenomenon that really resonates with my interests and thoughts on nomadic space and also how we, sort of, how these nomadic spaces are also transformed when modernity arrives. I’m not only interested in nomadicness, or, nomadic space in architecture in a nostalgic-traditional perspective, I’m interested in more of a ephemeral phenomenon. And I’m interested in seeing how we can learn from it, how we can bring it, bring values from it into the future and also how itself transforms when they become sedentary. What’s nomadic architecture when it, sort of, settles?
These ger settlements that are surrounding Ulaanbaatar, there is more than one million people living there. So, it’s huge. I think one-third of the whole population of Ulaanbaatar lives in this ger settlements where the nomads are slowly building nomad cities, surrounding the city centre of Ulaanbaatar, where some of the yurts get water, they get toilets, they get electricity, and roads start building up around the yurts. It’s very, very interesting sort of aesthetic and architectural transformation that’s happening there, where you could basically see that these tents are growing to become houses. They exist in very different, rare, strange forms, in different phases of that process.
One of the most interesting part of it is how, as a consequence of the land law in Mongolia that was established in the ’90s after they became, sort of, a neoliberal state and left the communist regime, every individual in Mongolia over eighteen was allowed to get a piece of land of twenty-by-twenty meters. In order to claim this piece of land, you have to put up a fence and the fence is called a khashaa. This fence has to be two meters tall and it has to be, you can’t look through it and it has to embrace this twenty-by-twenty-meter lot that you can have. So, what people do when they move into these outskirts, they claim that piece of land which they’re entitled to. What is starting to exist is a landscape of labyrinth fences with tents inside of them, which in itself is quite aesthetic and architecturally, quite interesting, you know. You move from the open-space landscape of the Mongolian tundra, which is probably a most fenceless landscape you can imagine, right? Really embracing this life as a nomad into something that’s completely the opposite where you actually block off your horizon by a non-transparent fence. Then that’s your new world. That’s where you put your new nomad life in. Some people bring their sheep or horses into this new life in the city. And it is really like a new sort of hybrid urban/rural, rural/urban landscape that is occurring there.
When people build these fences it’s also very interesting to see what material they choose or what building technique they choose because, basically, you don’t want to spend any money on it. It’s just sort of a part of a legislation: if you manage to put up a wall as fast as possible, you own the land. Then you see a lot of make-shift materialities in that where people use old car parts, they use old food cans, even bottles, and found material of all sorts just mish-mashed together to create this wall. A part of my project in Mongolia was to document those fences, these khashaa. So, I have a series of twenty photos of those that I’ve exhibited, and I made a book from it. Parallel to that, or, actually later on, I applied for some money to go back to do a film as well from one of the more interesting districts in these ger settlements. There are twenty districts of those, or something. So, I went to district one – in one of the older ones – and I shot the film there. I was really, really fascinated by this landscape and I was fascinated about this hybrid identities within the city and the idea of the nomad. What is really a nomad?
I was also kind of interested in how this whole phenomenon, somehow, also embraced this dual or these two contrasting utopian dreams that we all carry within us. You could really see the nomads of the rural countryside were dreaming of a good life in the city in capitalistic luxurity with a proper job, a good income, hot water, showers: this utopian life that they’re constantly exposed to through media and TV and film and this kind of stuff. The modern life in the city. So, they’re all racing to the city, dreaming of that life. But at the same time, they also kind of kept this utopian dream of this romantic life on the village: living free with the horses and sheep as true nomads. It’s so interesting to see those utopian images. Somehow everywhere you go in Mongolia, you will find both of those kind of dreams very present in people. Also, people that aren’t raised in the city, living life in luxurious, capitalistic models, fulfilling, somehow, the urban dream. They’re all very connected to this nomad – the idea of the nomad. They’re all very concerned about getting the right food, or, once in a while going out to the land and living with their ancestors. It is these kind of interesting contrasts that exists everywhere there.
That’s the where this film, where the idea of the film came from. It’s this interest in exploring this idea of the nomad in an urban context and using this extremely interesting materiality and colours that I had experienced throughout my first visit to Ulaanbaatar. When I went back there, I brought a film, a photographer, he’s a good friend of mine and also a Sami artist also working a lot with nomadic topics. He’s kind of a character. He’s called Matti Aikio and he’s a good friend. He’s a character that I somehow relate quite to and we can travel easily together because, of course, this was really make-shift and not really safe to go into these areas at night. We went there a lot in the break of dawn and the fall of night. So, when there’s no direct sunlight, there’s only that light in the film you can see. We got up really early in the morning and then we went back in when the night arrived. We had those windows of 45 minutes in the morning and in the night where all the filming is done. It’s a very intuitive production, which comes from a very photographic sort of vision, I guess. I had all the photos and now I wanted to transfer it into film and I brought a person that knows a lot about film to help me. So, that’s a bit how I did it. We just moved around there, filming tons of material. And then coming back I had written this text which was related to this kind of idea about the nomad. The text is very inspired by Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, where he writes about nomad cities, basically. I was inspired by that, the gaze that he has. It’s so beautiful, it’s like distance. It somehow is very dreamy, that whole book and how he portrays these cities as something that’s larger than yourself, as something that you sort of you can’t do anything but just gaze in awe, or, let yourself become a part of. It’s larger than life itself, in a way. And I really like that image of cities. It’s beautiful and it really resonates with me. I wanted to create something that had that kind of image, a little bit. At the same time that we’re questioning or playing around with this idea of the nomad, the Deleuze and Guattarian kind of concept of the nomad as untouchable, ungraspable, as a kind of evasive force. Based on those two models I wrote this short, very dense text. You can listen to it probably twenty times and it doesn’t really make sense. I wrote it a bit more – I wouldn’t call it poetry, but it has some kind of open-endedness. Some of the sentences are also a bit like riddles. But it’s also kind of humorous, I think, somehow. Because it becomes very almost vulgar in its pretentiousness, using all those big weird words really like painting that large image of the nomad. So, that’s how that came about.
Then editing the film together – I started running really out of time and also out of money and we just sort of edited together, me and the photographer. Matti became a really important part of the project. I am not really a filmmaker. I would have the balls to call myself a photographer but not really a filmmaker. I have done something before, but this is a first real film production that I had. For me, the film doesn’t really make sense because it’s so connected to that place. And it’s also so connected to physical space that I wanted to somehow create an atmosphere from. So, what I did when I was there, was that I also produced five large Mongolian felt pieces, which are – most of the felts that you see in the film, the yurts, the ger structures, they are covered by three to four 5-by-2 meter long woollen sheet felt wool pieces, which is the most essential basic architectural construction elements in Mongolian culture. Actually, in the city where I was filming, in this ger district, there was a small family-run factory and they were producing them for the whole of Ulaanbaatar. I went in there and I got to know them, and I produced five pieces together with the family, where I used the natural coloured black sheep wool and the white sheep wool. So, we were basically together, producing these kind of large scale abstract paintings from the wool, just improvising a bit – or I had some drawings. I wanted to create something that would be mountainous, like Mongolian mountains that had this kind of bit like architectural kind of space quality to it. A bit abstract but also a bit like shapes or landscape forms. It was a funny process, you know. I had an interpreter to help me do this. But these guys were like – they never experienced anything like this and they just thought it was so weird. “What are we doing? Why are we doing this?” Then I ended up paying them for the work and they were really happy to do it. In the end it became a really beautiful process where we produced these five pieces. These five pieces are also like parts of the construction, or, the making of them are embedded in the film, just to create the connection with the use of these felts. This is, of course, one of the main motives for making these felt pieces is to use them as seating when screening the film. That’s how I’ve shown the film: to somehow try and transfer the tactility, the materiality of these ger settlements with the woollen smell and the wool felt tactility, it’s incredible. Felt is the most special material. It’s a very sculpture material. It’s not woven. In a sense it’s not textile. It’s like squished together, moulded wool. So, it’s really amazing. It really also, of course, resonates with the idea of the rhizome and these structures that also Deleuze and Guattari talk about, the wool. That’s also a little bit sort of forged into this text piece that is a voice over of the show. So, that’s very important and of course the smell and the music that’s composed for the film is also, it’s a friend of mine that I worked with on four different projects. We’re actually working on another piece for next year, which I’m super excited about where we will work on a permanent installation for a school, a Sami Indigenous school, where we will use some of the same sort of material and sound elements that we’ve been sort of collaborating with for years now. It’s like we created our own little world of material sounds. So, he created the sounds, soundscape that has this atmosphere that also resonates a little bit with the felt and the way of being in this somehow ambient, a bit dreams space. That’s the film.
MDT: The way you describe the film, it sounds like it exists within an ecology of media. With the different types of media that you’re using in this installation – film, text, still imagery, and textiles – do you think the particular media are able to access particular understandings or space?
JN: Totally. For me, as an architect and as an artist working with space, I naturally also work with atmospheres and you work with sort of forging out atmospheres to appeal to different senses than just the vision and the sound, which is sort of thematic senses, right? It has in this case been super important. And to appeal to the smell through the use of the felts and also the tactility: the touch and the warmth that these felts are radiating when you sit on them it’s a really effectful. It has a lot of effect to the work itself. I think it somehow helps transporting you to that space, or, that space to you, making somehow this experience of that space become a bit closer. I think especially smell, it’s unique in those terms. Nothing connects you to your memory as the sense of smelling something, you know. You can smell your mother’s home baked bread in a bakery and you’re just like – bam – transported back to a memory from your childhood. There’s something with the smell that somehow, it really attracts memories, or, it really connects to memories for me, at least. These smells, they are unwashed Mongolian sheep wool, so they smell like crazy. Believe me all the galleries that have exhibited this work, it takes over everything and there’s no escape. I really like it. It’s a good smell, its sheep wool. It’s like a lanoline smell that unwashed wool also has. And it’s not unwashed, it’s washed of course, but it’s not washed with soap. So, it has that fatty material that makes it water resistant. So, that use of smell, the appeal to the smell, and the appeal to tactile, touch of the materiality was a very deliberate choice.
I think also there’s – it’s interesting how we in the end, also start to play with some elements in the film. We have some really beautiful shots from when we were making the felts. Me and the people working in the factory, we’re pressing down the felt and we’re touching the felt. I think it creates a nice connection when you sit on the felt and you see, you recognize the felt in the film and someone sort of like touched those images. It looks really dreamy and nice. We were sensitive to how, we’re creating and touching the felt. So, the materiality of the felt somehow comes out of the film and into the room. I think especially that moment, somehow, I think it works, if you want it to work. That’s the attempt, you know. The whole film, it’s wanting to be a portrait of a place. I wanted to portray this ger settlement, this nomad city. This is one of the strategies, artistic sort of strategies, that I used to create that portrait, to try and transport or create a link between the screen and the viewer somehow a bit more appealing to more senses and somehow through that bit stronger and closer.
MDT: You provide a lot of space for the viewer in this installation. Put another way, in the media that makes up Nomads Won’t Stand Still for their Portraits, you don’t include any pictures of people in these spaces.
JN: No.
MDT: Was that a conscious choice?
JN: That was not so conscious. That was something that, I think, was a bit of a natural consequence of how we were moving around in that area. We only had this friend of mine who sort of guided us around there and he didn’t live there. It’s a kind of a natural way of just behaving is to not be too intrusive. So, finding the more distant open places, where it felt okay to put up a camera. That’s part of the reason why a lot of the footage it’s not in the face of people, it’s not so aggressive. The way we chose the frames are somehow a bit humble and trying to manoeuvre within public space of these areas. Not being too private and intrusive as well. We didn’t want to intrude too much. But then, also, I think through the editing process itself, I think that we also realized that this was some of the really good features of the material that we have gathered and then we started to focus on that, deliberately. So, that’s also something that happened in the process when me and Matti were editing we saw that we had this really gorgeous, sort of a bit enigmatic, dark, and gloomy-dark shots where you could feel the people’s presence, but you could not really see them. That’s also how the title came, the title came through that editing process and I realized there’s something a bit about that. You can’t really grasp this. You can’t really get the portraits of the people, you can’t really grasp them and that somehow resonates with the nomadic way of moving. The title, A Nomad Won’t Stand Still for Their Portrait, is a bit of play off of that, I guess. But it makes sense also I think, to create that atmosphere.
It’s interesting also just to end that because even if I don’t see myself necessarily as a filmmaker, I think the reason why I say that is that I don’t really control the medium and the tools in the way I think someone calling themselves a filmmaker would say. I’ve been involved in a lot of consultation of film processes and I can watch a film and video art I watch all the time, I can very easily have opinions. To create the narrative using film is something quite intuitive, I think. Especially when you grew up watching films and video art, it’s something that I’m not totally ignorant towards.
MDT: I don’t read the film as necessarily trying to tell a story. I don’t necessarily read it as being experiential, either. There are other cues in the film that make me read it different. For instance, your use of voice-of-god narration.
JN: It’s a British curator that I produced the film together with for the first time. The first screening of it was in London in a gallery called Ambika P3. And the curator called David Thorpe, he invited me to produce a new work for that. It’s a show called Potential Architecture and it was me and three other architects turned artists, kind of presentations. And I tried so many different voiceovers, actually. That was the hardest part, I think, really what I was frustrated it never really worked. I had my own voice over my studio-mates here at, my atelier in Tromsø read it, my girlfriend, I sent it to Mongolia, to three different Mongolian friends that I have there. Didn’t work. And then I just ended up using David’s voice and I wasn’t one-hundred percent content about that at that time, either. But looking back on it, I think it adds another layer to the film. When it was in Canada, there was a review where someone referencing this film, they called it a mockumentary. I think that’s the voice of David that makes it a mockumentary. If you had another voice it could have easily become something else. But I kind of like that also, this David Attenborough, BBC voice-of-god, like you call it. It added another level that I wasn’t very conscious about, either, that I sort of ended up thinking gave the most to the film.
MDT: Mockumentary almost seems like too strident a term. I don’t know that I’d go that far but playing with convention, absolutely. It has a very interesting effect because it doesn’t make me read the imagery with any irony. If anything, I find myself very conscious of the disparity between what it is that he’s talking about and what it is that I’m seeing. There are clearly no nomads standing still for their portraits in the film.
JN: Yeah that’s true, I agree with you, actually. I was also a bit not mockumentary, at first. I was a bit reacting to it. But then having thought a bit more about it, then, I see where it comes from. I see that some people could interpret it like that. And that’s also fine. I like that. I am very generous towards people’s interpretation of whatever I do. It’s totally fine if people see something in it that I never had any clue that was there. Sometimes it also can feel like a gift, you know, that it’s actually that interpretable. It’s nice. Unless sometimes, of course, it can become scary also, you can’t control your own story. In this case, it’s totally fine. There is definitely a level of parody and irony to it and that was always the meaning. Also, it was the meaning, but even if I wasn’t like scripting it to happen. It kind of happened while editing and while shooting and all this like process, especially with Matti, who was editing together with me, you know. It’s really like, in a sense the editing part, it’s really a collaboration, I think. In some ways he should be also credited for that. He’s in the film. But good collaborations are like that. I really feel like that was something that happened during the filming, coming home, editing and then seeing how the voice worked on top of the imagery and then just playing with the certain aspects of it that we found interesting in terms of storytelling. This is one of them, for sure, this like lack of people, the dark gloominess, this pretentious BBC oration, narration. I like how they work together.
MDT: Do you see the film working in a particular tradition, then?
JN: No. Actually, you know what I was saying? This is interesting. I think, maybe the strongest reference for me in the film is maybe a film called Hollow Earth that’s made by my girlfriend and her partner Emilija Skarnulyte, which was a film production that they made as an installation in 2013, where I was very much involved in the whole process. Not as an artist, but as a partner making foods, helping them install, driving them to their gallery. I was just around really, really a lot during the making of that process and that film. It’s a film that I’ve seen so many times and it’s been shown at a lot of places and I’ve seen it like fifty times. You know, the way that they use the camera and that they use the soundscape on top of the camera is something that I have to say I’m really inspired by. That’s the way of sort of shooting landscapes, portraying places and a certain atmosphere in the landscape that I really liked. Also, the way they used long distance, more like overview, panoramic shots and then slowly moving their way into closer details in the film frames. That’s also something that we were very conscious about, me and Matti when we were making it. The way things move, which direction, sort of, the car moved from the left to the right, and you have this bit like feeling of some kind of a flow in the film and to edit it a bit intuitively as something where the perspectives and the movement in the frame somehow correspond to each other. That really resonates with the music. That’s really like the music and the way the imagery works. Of course, Matti was a really great help with those things because he’s also been making a few films before. Although, I think this is his best film. But don’t tell him.
That’s a film that I don’t think I was deliberately wanting to make something that was a bit in that category. But I think that I ended up just doing it, because maybe also as artists working a bit with travelling to places and gathering footage in places and then coming back in and working with it as a bit unplanned and unscripted methodology. As artists we’re, of course, a bit of the same me and my girlfriend. I think of that as a reference, actually. I don’t think I have seen any films that I would say, “Oh yeah, I was so inspired by that.” I don’t think I could mention almost any film but that one.