Fillip

Uncle Doug’s Fishing Shack
Jenifer Papararo

Joar Nango’s artistic method and process is informed by the cultural principal of improvisation. His approach is grounded in Indigenous ways of life and builds from Indigenous knowledges linked to land and the built environment. Nango’s research starts from his home and sovereign nation—the Sámi people, from the territories of Sápmi—and from there he works to build a global understanding of how Indigenous methodologies are and can be applied to architecture as a field that frames the communal practices of society at large.

The lávvu is a fundamental Sámi structure, reminiscent of the tipi of many Plains Indigenous Peoples in North America. Contemporary Scandinavian architecture often references the lávvu’s traditional form to symbolize the Sámi people—their heritage, traditions, and existing communities, inferring the nomadic lifestyle of some Sámi communities. Nango has collected numerous images of the symbolic lávvu turned into contemporary structures,1 whereby its cone-like form is fabricated in industrial building materials and used in civic architecture, from community centres to parliament buildings.2 In this manner, the lávvu becomes an architectural form that stands as a metaphor for the history and practices of an entire people. Nango is critical of this proliferation of the lávvu as symbolic reference, amounting to a one-dimensional representation of Sámi culture; rather, he is more interested in vernacular lived architectures. While the lávvu used as a symbol importantly acknowledges and gives representation to a sovereign culture, its pervasive replication in Western architecture is static and does not embody the characteristics of improvisation and pragmatic adaptation that are vital to the lived experiences of Indigenous life.

Nango’s research and artistic process, which uses performance, installation, video, text, and sound to query the histories and possibilities of architecture, works to define, embody, animate, and capture this adaptive and “Ingenuitive” way of being, beyond the symbolic. The following pages trace Nango’s artistic process, mapping in particular the development of his temporary installation and sculpture Uncle Doug’s Fishing Shack, presented at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art (Plug In ICA) in Winnipeg in 2019. To accomplish this, we have re-engaged a network of architects, scholars, and collaborators who contributed to the original artwork through conversations, workshops, knowledge sharing, lectures, and manual labour.

Exchanges between Nango and two Winnipeg-based Indigenous architects, Ryan Gorrie and David Thomas, examine the overwrought symbolic use of traditional Indigenous architectural forms such as the lávvu and tipi in comparison to contemporary lived Indigenous architectural practices and methodologies. These conversations are paired with excerpts from texts by architecture lecturer Timothy O’Rourke and independent scholar Courtney R. Thompson. O’Rourke critically questions the Australian government’s failure to recognize the ability of Indigenous thought and practices to address the nation’s contemporary housing needs. In her text, Thompson exposes the continued suppression of Indigenous ingenuity in the propagation of symbolic and clichéd forms such as the tipi in her examination of the Canadian government’s request to Indigenous artists to contribute to the Canada Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montréal. As the curator of Uncle Doug’s Fishing Shack, I interweave text between these excerpts that reflect on Nango’s research process and the conversations that ignited, developed, and epitomized the nature of this collaborative and improvisational site-specific installation.

What follows is a series of texts by Ryan Gorrie, Joar Nango, Timothy O’Rourke, Dave Thomas, and Courtney R. Thompson together with my contextualizing comments in italics.

Uncle Doug’s Fishing Shack was commissioned by Plug In ICA for STAGES, a temporary public art exhibition in Winnipeg. The settler city of Winnipeg carries histories that were born long before it. Its stories are linked to the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers and are as murky as the city’s name, which means “muddy waters”: win-nipi in Inninewak (Cree). The city developed on the Treaty Territories and ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg, Anishininewuk, Dakota Oyate, Denesuline, and Nehethowuk and is established as the Métis homeland.

Many narratives manufacture this colonial city, but it is the lives and practices of Indigenous cultures that were there long before it and continue to thrive that most directly informed Nango’s installation. Early in his research of the region, the artist engaged local architect Ryan Gorrie, a member of Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek (Sand Point First Nation on Lake Nipigon), who works to incorporate Indigenous cultural practice into his design methods.