Lena Stenberg

I grew up in the Laevas Sámi community outside Kiruna. Sweden’s largest mining company operates on the community’s land. The Sámi community has therefore always been heavily pressured by the mining industry in the area, while at the same time providing the city of Kiruna and the whole of Sweden with raw material income. This has naturally shaped me. On both my mother’s and father’s sides, my family descends from people who were forcibly relocated from the Karesuando–Tromsö region. I have traced my family through old photographs and documents, seeing how their roots with the lands in Finland and Norway were severed forever.

The connection to the old settlements and migration routes was broken. After the new border agreements of 1919, the Swedish state forcibly relocated large groups of Sámi from Karesuando further south.

I often work from my own perspective, my experiences, and the political battle I grew up with. Environment and nature are important aspects of my practice, as are current events and history. A key turning point in my artistic work came when my grandmother gave me a photo album in my twenties, filled with family photographs. They were images from Arjeplog, where she had been forcibly relocated as a young woman. The North Sámi were seen as exotic, so there were countless photographs of her family and relatives. It was then I began to understand how devastating Sámi history was during the 20th century, a period still so close in time. The abuses that took place, the suppression and forced relocations of Sámi people. When the Nordic countries strengthened their national borders and decided the land was needed for other industries. Many families were split apart and forcibly moved by the Swedish state to unfamiliar settlements further south, to areas with different reindeer herding practices, cultures and languages. An act of violence that continues to affect Sámi life today.

Nature, culture, identity and questions of belonging are recurring themes in my work. I explore background and connection to places and natural landscapes, and how environment, nature and place shape human identity and living conditions. How the history of a place is intertwined with contemporary events. My artistic practice often moves between historical reflection and political issues. My work also expresses the human need for protection in life, against climate, weather, environment and other external forces such as land exploitation. Environmental destruction and land use are themes I frequently return to, as in the art projects Mark användning, Time out and Landskap takeover, or in the works Deformationszon and Girun.