Irene Pernille Snarby

Snarby, Irene
Irene Pernille Snarby, PhD fellow and Curator, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway.

Conference Report. December 2024

I have had the honor of getting one of CiMAMs travel grants by the Norwegian OCA and was, therefore, able to travel from the North of Norway, also known as Sápmi, to Los Angeles, USA. Here, I had the pleasure of hearing great talks from different angles of sustainability from museum workers and artists and seeing spectacular exhibitions throughout Los Angeles.

The organizers of the CiMAM conference have done tremendous work to give us the opportunity to experience as many relevant talks and exhibitions as possible. With a program of just three days, we were busy from early morning until bedtime. And sometimes, we had to run through interesting exhibitions to be able to keep the program. In this report, I will focus on the talks I have heard since I had far too little time to evaluate the exhibitions. Still, I feel that I could not have used my three conference days better.

The talks and lectures about sustainability seem both urgent and important. Keywords of who and what is included and excluded, how work is action on how we see our future, the importance of staying connected, how to protect intellectual freedom, the importance of agency, and a holistic perspective on sustainability are highly relevant. The climate and carbon footprint of the audience was one of the topics also discussed by the panel. Here, I missed the voice of the small museums in remote locations. Like the one I used to work in, for instance, The Sámi Museum in Kárášjohka, Norway. The rich and important art collection here does not have a venue for showing what it contains, the most interesting contemporary art made by Sámi artists. Every art piece must be on the road to be exhibited. People living in the village can not see their own artist’s work. They must travel to experience this. And a bus stop outside the museum would not help as there is only one bus a day, and no train or boat. How can these small museums connect with and benefit from knowledge from the bigger museums, and vice versa?

The second day opened with a great keynote from the Canadian businesswoman and social entrepreneur Zita Cobb. She told us how she had lived for three centuries on Fogo Island on the Labrador coast. She grew up without electricity, and all her community lived in a certain kind of fishery that, in the nineteen sixties, was run over by modern trawlers, resulting in local people having to reconsider how to survive. How could they strengthen the communities and economies? They found a way by developing without growing, but rather deepening. Making their location relevant by serving the place they live, through art projects, and careful tourism. The thought behind is that everything is passing except the past, and what matters is what you do. That sustainability is care. And by this they managed to turn money into fish again.

The third day was time for the Indigenous people to talk, and this session made everything connect for me.

It started with a keynote talk from Candice Hopkins, a Carcross/Tagish First Nation independent curator, writer, and now an Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Forge Project in New York. This is a Native led organization whose mandate is to cultivate and advance Indigenous leadership in art and culture. It is a non-profit organization working to upend political and social systems formed through generations of settler colonialism. They acknowledge that they are situated on the unceded homelands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuk, the Peoples of the Waters that Are Never Still. This land and its people are timeless, and they pay honour and respect to this history and to the Elders-past, present, and future.[1]

For them it is vital to investigate what sustains them, and while being hyperlocal, they move at the speed of trust, in consensus making, and giving back with no strings attached. They share food, farm projects, and knowledge, building a pathway of reparations.

They work closely with knowledge holders to show how knowledge is transferable through generations that can benefit the community.

The involved artists are informed before the loan so they can accept or oppose whether their work can be part of other projects. And the fees always go to the artists.

The botanic part of the museum area is about returning to the domestic plant life. They use dormant seeds that are local and beneficial and share plant knowledge, considering the land that they are on. This has resulted in a sustainable garden where not only the birds but also the insects are returning. In the nighttime, the sound of contented insects is so loud that they sometimes must close the windows to be able to sleep inside. This is what Hopkins calls the sound of not being a museum.

Later in this Indigenous session, we heard about sustainable communities, Indigenous Perspectives, and world views, art, and ecology, and how things we do matter. The importance of looking at the past as we walk into the future

Maya-Kaqchikel, visual artist and poet from Chi Xot, San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala, Edgar Calel, talked about his works and how not everything is for sale. We must understand that the gifts we are given do not last forever. Calel works with rituals for spirits to come back to our bodies, and bringing this into contemporary art.

The last speaker was artist, curator, activist and writer Djon Mundine. He is a member of the Bundjalung people of northern New South Wales in Australia. He spoke about how curating is to care, and that we want to make stories that are both universal and personal, and that the artist has the terminal voice. He also spoke about the dark history of colonial Australia, and how Indigenous spirituality is still being ignored. Australia is still a colony, but it will always be aboriginal land.

This session gave us very strong stories of how to listen, and learn how to care for, and respect what we have been given. To learn from Indigenous knowledge and spirituality can help us in our quest of being more sustainable and to have a future for years to come. We need to scale down and grow deeper, not bigger. The most sustainable thing people and museums can do today is to cooperate with and listen to the nature rather than tame and oppose it.

[1] https://forgeproject.com/ seen 19.12.2024


Biography

Irene Pernille Snarby (b. 1967) is a curator and Ph.D.candiate at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

2014 Mobilizing the Past, Ph.D. level TBLR, Zürich, Switzerland

2013 Scientific Theory, Ph.D. level Uit-The Arctic University of Norway

2013 Research ethics, Ph.D. level Uit-The Arctic University of Norway

2011 Bildekunst mellom historie, estetikk og praksis /Art between history aesthetics and practice, phD. level, The University of Tromsø

2011 Urfolksmetodologi / Indigenous methodology, phD.level The University of Tromsø

2010 Om Kunst og kulturformidling / About Art and Art communication The University of Tromsø

2009 Personal og kompetanseutvikling i kunst- og kulturinstitusjoner /Personnel and competence developmentin Art and Cultural institutions

The University of Tromsø

2008 Kunst og kulturformidlig for barn og unge/ Art and Art communication for children and youth Høgskolen /College in Tromsø

2006 Samisk innføringskurs 2 Sámi language 2 Samisk høgskole/ Sámi Collage, Kautokeino, Norway

2003 –2005 Sámi language Language Center in Lakselv, Norway

1997 Art History Master The University of Oslo, Norway

1996 Konstvetenskap, 80 points / Art History The University of Lund, Sweden

1990 Pedagogikk grunnfag/ Pedagogy The University of Trondheim, Norway

1989 Psykologi grunnfag/ Psycology The Universitetet i Tromsø, Norway

1988 Eksamen Philosophicum The University of Tromsø, Norway

Irene Pernille Snarby, PhD fellow and Curator, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway, has been awarded by OCA, Office for Contemporary Art Norway.