A Festival With a Political Heart
Interview with Riddu Riđđu Festivála’s director, Sajje Solbakk.
Sajje Solbakk is now halfway through the contract period as director of the international Indigenous festival Riddu Riđđu Festivála. Hakapik talked to Solbakk about her priorities, the relationship between arts and politics, this year’s festival exhibition and why choosing “queer indigenous artists,” for their annual program “Northern People of the year” was important.
Text by Marion Bouvier
You started as director in 2022. What have your main priorities been and how did you implement them so far?
– First of all, I think Riddu Riđđu is such a great festival and there's already been a lot of great work done, so it hasn't been necessary to implement any big changes to move things forward. For me, the Sámi language has been important, and I'm so lucky that Sandra Márjá West [the festival’s previous director, editor’s note.] also spoke Northern Sámi, so there was a strong foundation for me to build on. In coastal Sámi areas we have made big steps to reclaim our history and to take back our identity, our regalia, and our symbols; however I think the language remains an essential area to revitalize, so that the Sámi language becomes the primary language in these areas again. The language has been my focus both in terms of visibility when communicating about the festival, but also at the festival we have had conversations and panels that are only in Sámi, sometimes with translators but also without.
– In addition to that, Riddu Riđđu is an important safe space to talk about anything in Sámi society. I am quite political as a person, I come from a very political family and I have been raised that way. We try to be relevant in the political societal debates as well, which is also coherent with Riddu Riđđu’s core, historically. That's how it all started, it was a group of young activists who started Riddu Riđđu. The festival has always been a stage where we bring topics up for debate, including topics our communities might not have been ready to discuss or haven't been discussed before. I think that's one of the festival’s strengths and I want it to remain so.
Last year you introduced a new set of rules for the festival, which notably targeted cultural appropriation. This bold move sparked a debate. How did that come to be and how do you assess the results of this decision?
– We went on a work trip in Minneapolis and was invited to a powwow [a Native American and First Nations gathering that involves dancing, singing and socializing amongst others]. When we first arrived, we were given a flyer with guidelines and rules of what to do and what not to do, in order to be respectful of the people whose area it was, but also how to act at a powwow. I thought it was a great tool for me as a guest on other indigenous people's traditional areas because I came not quite knowing how it all works. I wanted to bring this idea back home. I knew some parts of our guidelines could be controversial, but that's how I also see Riddu Riđđu: being two steps ahead of our time, and having a societal and political responsibility. The guidelines were made together with one of our sister festivals, Márkomeannu, as we identified some common challenges and things we wanted to avoid.
– Beyond the guidelines themselves, we wanted to start a debate, as some of these topics can also be taboo in our own communities. Especially the parts about the drums, our religion and also our joiking traditions. Of course it was important for us to listen to the responses that we got, especially from our own communities. That’s why this year we have decided on adjusting two or three of the guidelines. I'm very excited about that and I hope that we will continue discussing these topics publicly.
Visual arts have taken more and more space in the Young Artist of the Year program, where Riddu Riđđu highlights an emerging Sámi artist. More generally, I would also say that the festival exhibition has become a bigger part of the festival. What would you say is the place of visual arts at Riddu Riđđu?
–Music has been at the core of our program with our main stage being a concert space, but the festival is growing and we are including many other sides of the Sámi and indigenous art scene. Now we don’t just have duojárs, joikers and singers. We also have Sámi filmmakers, Sámi drag artists and a lot more. I feel that we have this great luxury that we have so many artists from Sápmi to choose from as the duodji and art scenes have expanded, which was not always the case in the past. I don’t have statistics, but it’s kind of crazy how many interdisciplinary artists we have in Sápmi for a community that is quite small compared to other parts of the world.
I am wondering if you see a relation between this strong proportion of creative people in Sámi communities and the fact that duodji is so present in Sámi culture; my feeling is that many Sámi kids have access or knowledge about crafts and creative expressions because Sámi culture has fostered and preserved its traditions around duodji, storytelling, as well as joiking, as an integral part of a way of life, which cannot be said of the Norwegian culture, in my opinion.
–Yes, I think there are many reasons behind this. But also, there are still debates on what can or should be considered art: for example duodji hasn't been considered art for a long time, and even though there are now many duojárs who would say that it's an art form, it doesn’t mean that it should be put into that box by the western art field, –and that’s the same with joik. Joik is still something quite new to perform on a music stage. It is traditionally a language, a way of communicating and for some families it still is. For these traditions to be turned into art forms also shows that things are shifting, and that can spark some interesting discussions.
– I also think that, as we see on the Sámi art scene, a lot of the art is political. Last year we had an event at the festival to discuss if Sámi artists hold more power than our politicians. Which is maybe something we can't answer, but it's an interesting thought and it is a reality that lots of artists use their art politically. For example, Máret Ánne Sara, who designed our poster this year. She really started out as an artist when her brother had a court case against the Norwegian state about his reindeer herd, and she saw that she needed to do something. So her art emerged from a political act.
The Sámi pavilion at the Venice Biennale marked a shift towards more international recognition for Sámi artists, which was also a sign of changing attitudes in the international community towards recognizing Indigenous rights and cultures. Do you also feel that trend at Riddu Riđđu, that there is more attention from the international audience?
– Riddu Riđđu has been working internationally for almost 30 years, so international work is not new to us. I often say that we, as a festival, are more recognized internationally than nationally. Wherever I travel around the world for work, people seem to know what Riddu Riđđu is, and especially our Indigenous relatives have either been at the festival or heard about the festival.
– When the Venice Biennale took place, I think many of us cultural workers were worried that the Sámi arts field may not be strong enough to meet the demand that will come after the Sámi Pavilion, because we are struggling with a lack of resources. Now we experience a growing demand, and just last month we hired a fifth permanent employee to the festival because we do so many other things than only organizing the festival.
Do you feel that while you are experiencing this increasing interest and requests for Sámi arts and culture, you still have to face a lot of misconceptions or have to do a lot of explaining to people who are non-indigenous?
–Yes, and that has been one of the main topics at many Sámi arts conferences in the last couple of years. I don't know how many seminars I've been at talking about these things, and especially in meetings with institutions. There are bookers that don't have enough knowledge about Sápmi, and people that only are like, “For the 6th of February, I need a Sámi artist,” and they google “joik” and then ask the artist, “We just need someone to joik, could you do it for free?” It’s kind of shameful.
–Although it's amazing that Norwegian kindergarten schools and other institutions want to include Sámi arts, it's important that we at Riddu Riđđu can deal with that lack of knowledge, and that we can help the artists build an apparatus around them, so they don't need to be constantly faced with those kind of misconceptions, and give them the opportunity to live from the arts.
What is this year’s festival exhibition about?
–The exhibition is entitled “Visualizing Arctic Voices.” It's a collaborative project with art historians from the University of Tromsø. It is about decolonizing the expeditional stories from 1750 to early 1900s and bringing forth the Indigenous stories that are still unknown from that time. Everyone has maybe heard about Nansen and Amundsen and those Norwegian big heroes, but maybe people haven’t heard about how the Inuit helped them, or how they had Sámi helpers. The exhibition also features contemporary works by Indigenous artists around the topics of decolonization and repatriation, such as Outi Pieski, Anders Sunna, and Raisa Porsanger.
Every year for the past 24 years, you have given a special spot in the program to one indigenous people that you invite to the festival. This year you chose “queer indigenous artists” as the Northern People of the Year. I thought that was an exciting choice. How did that come about?
–Last year, I talked to a few Sámi queer people who said that they didn't feel like they had the same opportunity to work as artists in our communities as non-queer do. Then the idea came up, to invite not one indigenous people, but to choose queer indigenous. We will bring artists from Kalalitnunat / Greenland, USA, Canada, and Sápmi, so it's going to be a big delegation of almost 30 people. The program consists of seminars, workshops, drag performances, poetry, and a lot more in the festival area. But also, it's a great starting point to use the festival for establishing a queer indigenous network.
– We are planting the seeds at the festival, and then hopefully this will influence the many other indigenous stages and non-indigenous stages and bookers to open their eyes to all the great queer artists we have. This is maybe the project I’m proudest of so far, it feels like a moment in history. And for us at Riddu Riđđu it's part of a learning experience to make ourselves responsible. To be up to date about what is happening in the queer art world, and to integrate as many voices from our communities as possible.
What are your hopes and dreams for Riddu Riđđu when you leave the position as director?
– I really hope that Riddu Riđđu continues and gets stronger in expanding the borders of what is allowed in our communities, pushing the boundaries and daring to be different. I wish for us to be a voice that moves our communities forward. Then I hope of course that Riddu Riđđu will be able to involve even more indigenous voices from all over the world. We are naturally very good at working in the arctic and the circumpolar areas, but there are so many indigenous peoples around the world that still don't have these opportunities and that are struggling with different political issues. It is very important that we bring those topics to the table here in Sápmi; for example what’s happening with Chile and the Mapuche, who are basically fighting the same enemy as us, which is Statskraft.
Circling back to where we started, you said you grew up in a political family. Do you remember a turning point in your life when you realized you also wanted to do political work?
– Growing up in Tromsø, I thought I should be the same as everyone else and I shouldn't stick out or be different. I don’t know if it was the exact turning point, but I remember the period around 2011 when there were the big debates to decide if Tromsø should be called a Sámi municipality. That's something that really affected me: I was 14 years old then, in that period when you're still trying to find yourself but also don’t want to stand out. There was a lot of hate, both in the streets and at school, and that worried me a lot in my youth and it changed me quite a lot.
– After that, I decided to have my confirmation in my Sámi gákti, although I was really hesitant in the beginning. But I became prouder and prouder and then I moved to Oslo and was part of founding the youth organization Oslove Noereh, which I became the leader of when I was 17. I haven't looked back since!
