GNS+ Lecture: Juliane Egerer, “The Art of Change: Decolonization, Indigenous Gender Struggles, and the Environment in Cultural Creations by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Ann-Helén Laestadius”

Canada-based Blackfoot (Kainai) and Sámi filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Sweden-based Sámi and Tornedalian writer Ann-Helén Laestadius neither define themselves as environmentalists nor activists, although their artistic works actively engage with the complex issues of environmental justice, gender, resource extraction, and ongoing colonialism. Employing confrontational aesthetic strategies, they counter the Eurowestern neo-liberalism of politico-economic elites in post-democratic societies with Indigenous worldviews, relational ontologies, and relational epistemologies as forms of imagining otherwise. Drawing on the examples of Tailfeathers’s 2011 experimental short film Bloodland and Laestadius’s 2016 and 2018 young adult novels Tio över ett (Ten Past One) and Inte längre min (No Longer Mine), the guest
lecture proposes to apply the cross-genre category of artivist works and to understand the works of both cultural creators as artivism.