Pile o’Sápmi by Máret Ánne Sara

Máret Ánne Sara is an artist, author and journalist. She is from a reindeer herding family in Kautokeino and currently works in her hometown. Máret Ánne is the initiator of Dáiddadállu Artist Collective and works with both visual arts and authorship. Sara is currently working on the contemporary art project Pile o’Sápmi, which was presented at Documenta 14 in Kassel in 2017.

Among her notable art projects is Pile o’Sápmi that was created as a protest and a symbol of the Norwegian government’s forced slaughter of reindeer belonging to indigenous Sámi herders in Finnmark. Máret Ánne Sara created the original work as an installation of 200 reindeer heads outside the Inner Finnmark District Court in February 2016, where her brother Jovsset Ante Sara brought a case against the Norwegian government.

In parallel, Pile o’Sápmi branched into an interdisciplinary art movement. Máret Ánne Sara curates art and artists to raise awareness and further debate about the ongoing struggles for Sámi rights in Norway and the rest of Sápmi. Several of Sápmi’s foremost artists have exhibited and performed work in galleries and in public spaces in Deatnu, Tromsø and Oslo, closely tracking the case as it moves through the legal system.

Pile o'Sápmi working to promote critical debate on both policy and processes that have led to the Sami reindeer husbandry and Sami reindeer herders today is virtually no rights against government systems and legislation.