echoes of elsewhere

This presentation is based on Sara Salminen's dissertation "unsettling trajectories – thinking queerly with Sámi feminisms, art and archive", which is written as a part of a growing dialogue between gender studies and Sámi studies.

Grounded in Sámi feminist and queer theoretical studies, and by building on the international field of queer Indigenous studies, the thesis explores Nordic settler colonial logics of erasure and their impact on Sámi understandings of gender and sexuality, as well as how the relations between Indigeneity, gender and sexuality are being re-imagined in feminist and queer/trans Sámi art.
In this presentation Salminen will focus on the different artworks by Katarina Pirak Sikku and Outi Pieski, which go along and against colonial (knowledge) institutions and trajectories, that place Sámi Indigeneity as out of time, and thereby shape the conditions for Sámi feminist and queer (knowledge) struggles in the settler colonial present. The artworks do not only stay with the colonial world, but instead, also echo out from it to an elsewhere, and in this presentation, we will follow these echoes. By thinking with the art, Salminen propose, that by creating resurgent/decolonial soundscapes, as echoes of elsewhere, Sámi feminist and queer art demonstrates how other worlds can be imagined in the settler colonial dystopian present.

Dr Sara E. Salminen is a queer feminist scholar working in the fields of Indigenous feminist, queer and settler colonial studies. Salminen holds a PhD in gender studies and is invested in decolonial and creative methodologies. Salminen’s interdisciplinary thesis unsettling trajectories: thinking queerly with Sámi feminisms, art and archives (2026) is an exploration of settler colonial common sense in academic Nordic feminist and queer thinking, as well as a critical dialogue with Sámi art, Indigenous resurgence and queer theorising.