The artwork AAhkA, chosen for the pyramidal building in the new government quarter in Oslo, is of a monumental scale. According to the sketches, the 50-metre-high wooden relief portrays a female figure which will be visible day and night through the transparent walls when the building is completed in 2025. Despite the size, the portrait endows this abstract architectonic space with a human face. Further provided with attributes and ornaments referring to the Sámi craft tradition, the monumental figure represents material, maternal, and Indigenous values in public space. But is it possible to transform the Sámi craft traditions, considered so-called “minor arts”, to major monuments?¹ And is monumentality desirable?

Since the terror attack in Norway on the 22nd of July 2011, where a bomb killed and harmed several people and destroyed the buildings of the government quarter, this place has been an open sore in the urban body as well as in the nation's soul.² The strict security arrangements and building demolitions that followed were further harrowing. The discussions of architectural competitions for the new quarter, as for the memorial site, have been profound. There seems to be a deep need to testify to the history of this site, to make a memorial, and to secure a future free and democratic use of the new public space. This is the context of AAhkA.

AAhkA adds another frame of reference. While the title's capital 'A's obviously make a pun with the name of the pyramidal 'A-block', as it is the site of the artwork, a deeper meaning is found in the Sámi languages and cultures. Aahka, ahkko, or áhkku means grandmother, old wife, elderly woman, guardian. The word is also used as a name on sacred mountains, and the goddess Mother Earth is named Máttaráhkká. According to the artist Outi Pieski, the female figure in the artwork titled AAhkA personifies Mother Earth as ‘a legal person’.

On this very site in Oslo, there have been Sámi women and men protesting against Norwegian laws and ignorance towards the Indigenous people. AAhkA's reference to the Norwegian Government's cultural oppression and nature intervention in Sápmi cannot be ignored. The colonisation of Sámi land that has taken place through centuries is now further escalating under the cover of being “green” and is threatening the natural environment and Sámi ways of life. The two departments that are to have their offices in the A-block, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries and the Ministry of Climate and Environment, will make decisions that directly determine the future of the peoples in Norway that are deeply connected to and conditioned by their natural environments.³ This is the context of AAhkA.

Thus, this public artwork questions the nation state's central dominance, whilst being raised in the midst of its power. AAhkA carries out that position by creating care — monumental care. The concept of care has a double root: it is both a burdensome worrier and a guardian and protector for future life, being a continuously ongoing process. Also, the concept of monument and monumentality carries a resembling duality, both to remind and to reveal, to warn and to be on alert. AAhkA seems to respond to the challenge art historian Mechtild Widrich utters in her book on ‘Monumental Cares’, that ‘the task for theorists of monumentality today, as much as for monument-makers, is to understand how an ethics of care can meet and interact forcefully with a politics of taking responsibility’.⁴

Outi Pieski, rematriation and craftivism
One of the monument-makers of today is Outi Pieski (b. 1973), from the Finnish side of Sápmi.⁵ She was chosen after a sketch competition for this prominent space, and one of the jury’s arguments for selecting her proposal was the artwork's connections to ‘Sámi craft traditions’.⁶ However, the artist's sketches and the monumental scale seem far from such craft traditions, termed duodji. Duodji is the whole and holistic process of making and using, informed by the knowledge of where to find natural resources, how to treat materials and tools, and how to create the perfect form for the item’s specific practical use. Thus, duodji encompasses far more than the final “product”, as we usually consider a monumental public artwork. Duodji is even considered to be ‘the core of the Sámi indigenous knowledge system’, as Sámi museologist Liisa-Rávná Finbog elevates it in her scholarly works.⁷

As a visual artist, Pieski brings duodji into shared public space, both in the case of AAhkA, and in numerous other public commissions in Sápmi and the Nordic countries. Transforming traditional Sámi duodji items and ornamental patterns by enlarging or repeating, in a rich variety of materials and media, is one of Pieski's foremost artistic methods. These are items that historically have been dedicated time, care, and skilled craftsmanship in Sámi craft production. Pieski takes as her point of departure the objects which are close to the body, such as headgear, brooches, shawls, spoons, and walking sticks.

Much of Pieski's building-related art can be seen as decoration in a quite literal sense, as she hangs colourful textiles from the ceiling or adds ornaments on the wall, adorning and equipping the building for its task. She sometimes uses silver and brass, which were believed to protect against evil, and which give a spiritual dimension to the public art. And she often draws on women's soft textile traditions, which give a feminist or maternal dimension. These are artworks that adorn and give identity to the building and its users.

As Pieski has shown in her former projects, especially in the interdisciplinary project Máttaráhku ládjogahpir–Foremothers’ hat of pride, together with the archaeologist and researcher Eeva-Kristiina Nylander, duodji also is about relating to the ancestors as well as gathering the contemporary Sámi society. Pieski and Nylander have designated their project as rematriation (a feminist expansion of repatriation), and as craftivism (an activism that uses handicraft as medium while empowering the participants).⁸ They underscore the importance of taking care of the legacy of the foremothers, emphasising how women share skills and ideas. On the one hand, Pieski expands the understanding of duodji. On the other hand, she explores how craft-based art and duodji thinking can influence public art and challenge the understanding of monumentality.

In the global art world, craft has been a field where care is practised, especially in the traditional female mediums like weaving and textile, and in the collective art practices of women. This concept of care and its practices was given specific attention from the early 1980s onwards, and concurrently in Sápmi during the cultural revitalisation.⁹ Pieski continues this tradition of craft and care, however freeing herself from the traditional female media. She further embraces the indigenous “matter of care” that encompasses the broader environment and includes spiritual and communal values, emphasising interconnectedness, holistic well-being, and collective responsibility.¹⁰

Duodji as public art
Since the upcoming of Sámi public buildings in the late 1960s, prominent Sámi artists have provided architectural space with significant works which have given the singular buildings their identity.¹¹ One example, now threatened to be demolished, is Iver Jåks’ concrete relief The Dance of the Gods in the entrance hall of Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (1972), the Sámi art collection and museum in Karasjok/ Kárášjohka where Sámi mythology appeared in symbolic form. The increasing number of Sámi institutional buildings in the decades to follow have become home to important artworks made by Sámi visual artists, and by duojárat keeping the craft tradition alive. Outi Pieski’s public artworks bring this history forward, consistently insisting on the Sámi world as being the source of artistic practice. Her most recent artworks are also to be found in shared public spaces even outside Sápmi, as is the case of AAhkA.

For the Sámi Parliament in Finland, finally receiving new premises in Inari/Aanaar/Anár in 2012,¹² Pieski was given the artistic commission for the plenary hall. Her work Eatnu, eadni, eana / Stream, mother, ground is hung down the wall as a wealth of enlarged leaves of the traditional Sámi brooch, risku, made of gilded metal plates and ceramic spoons, and smaller details in foot bone and bead-embroidered fabric. Parts of the motif are applied to the podium, contributing to unity in the circular plenary hall. These elements are both decorative and clear markers of Sámi identity.

In 2015, the Sámi Parliament on the Norwegian side received a new office wing, a long corridor which opens up towards a view over the town and the Kárášjohka river, and Pieski was commissioned to produce the main artwork, which she titled Leagi vuoigna / Spirit of the valley. It is a series of V-shaped fabrics hung from the ceiling through the passageway. They vibrate in space, overlap each other, and become blurred in depth. With their decorative patterns, colours, and tassels, they are a fragmented presence of the traditional shawl used with the Sámi gákti, and in this context celebrating the feminine and creative “soft” duodji, as found in much of Pieski's artistic practice. Pieski has made varied versions of these tassels or shawls and combined them into different suspended sculptures, always adapted to their specific context in an act of respect and care.

This is particularly noticeable in one of her most recent works completed in 2024, Guovssat–Suojametsä, made for a health institution, Lapland Central Hospital in Rovaniemi/Roavvenjárga. Created collaboratively with various craft makers, this piece merges contemporary art with traditional duodji through a three-dimensional textile installation of hand-woven knots. The work is inspired by the gathering of Sámi people in their gávttit¹³, according to Pieski, which she in another context has conceptualised as a performative 'monument'.¹⁴ Installed in the hospital, the colourful V-shaped tassels sprawl like feathers against the large windows and circle in the ceiling above. The title is a compound word, and obviously informs the artwork in its conception and in its performance. Guovssat is the northern Sámi name of the Siberian jay, a bird in the northern Boreal forests with a lively plumage. It is social and curious, and known to bring good luck.¹⁵ Suojametsä is Finnish, meaning protection or security. The title imbues Pieski's repeated shawls or bird-like installation with a dimension of care that adorns or equips the health institution with a public art of liveliness. The work is further connecting to the ancestors, and to enliven nature. Set in this hospital environment, Guovssat–Suojametsä is meant to provide delight and distraction from pain, and to reinforce a sense of belonging.

A small antler spoon became Pieski's starting point for a larger building-related artwork, Guektien bïegkese–Guovtte biggii–Two Directions, a new entrance to the Nordic Museum in Stockholm in 2020, which was a commission from the museum itself in collaboration with the Public Art Agency Sweden. This spoon from the South Sámi area, an everyday object that was once worn in the belt as a personal belonging, is included in the museum's large collection of Sámi objects. Pieski has drawn and enlarged the ornamental pattern on the spoon and transferred it to the walls and ceiling made in corten steel, oak, and glass. The result is a decorative play of light and shadow in the new entrance, and a marker of cultural heritage and identity. Guektien bïegkese–Guovtte biggii–Two Directions reminds visitors of the Sámi duodji objects in the Nordic Museum's collection, and of the museum's colonial history.¹⁶ The monumentality of this museum entrance is less about size and power than about reminding, remembrance, and negotiation of the ownership of Sámi objects and history.

The process of making
Outi Pieski lives in Dálvadas, a small village of the Deatnu river valley in Ohcejohka/Utsjok, and this is also her primary working place. Even for the large-scale installations, the smaller parts are often crafted at her kitchen table. She utters the importance of home as a place for making, and of duodji as a part of life: ‘When people craft things, it’s usually done at home, in the place they live. I make my work the same way.’¹⁷ In some of her projects, she works collectively and gathers women for sharing the knowledge and practice of duodji. In these projects, she has first and foremost preserved and developed dipmaduodji, the type of duodji that deals with the soft materials, like skin, wool, and textiles, as a process of reconnection to the foremothers, and as an ever-ongoing process of rematrialisation. Traditionally, the two main branches of duodji were based on the materials and tools used, and it was gendered. Garraduodji was dealing with specific tools and methods for the hard materials, like wood, bone, antler, and metal. In most of her artistic projects Pieski is combining both kinds, thus enjoying the richness and freedom of duodji.

The practice of making, duddjot, is considered as important as the final product, duodji. The duojár or artist works with materials, and also with concepts, thus duddjot involves bodily as well as mental labour. Important parts of the crafting process are to know where and when to find the materials, and to move through the landscapes, meahcit, only taking what is needed. Duddjot is the mastery of the tools and the skills to give functional form. It is to know where to place the decor and the understanding of its deeper meaning.¹⁸ Duodji as a material language can be parallelled to the spoken Sámi languages, which are characterised by being verb-based, rather than noun-based. Duodji is performative, rather than object-oriented.

Many of Pieski's earlier public artworks bear witness to long and patient crafting. But how will the enormous AAhkA perform traces of duddjot, of the process of making? While Pieski most often builds up her artworks by smaller units made by hand using traditional techniques, for some of her larger public works she utilises machine-produced elements. This is the case for the new entrance at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm. The artist cooperated with the architect and entrepreneurs to realise her sketches based on the decorated Sámi spoon. In the A-block in the government quarter in Oslo, space and material are predestined by the architect. The interior has been detailed in wood, intending to give ‘passersby an impression of warmth through the extensive glazing at the buildings' lower level’, so the architect claims.¹⁹ Even though the artists invited for the competition were free to choose their own formats, materials, and placement for their sketch proposals, Pieski chose to work with and develop her proposal for the already existing sloping wall and wooden surface. To produce AAhkA on a 700-square-metre wall of birch slats will be a collective crafting project. The pattern will be carved out by machines, the lines and dots painted, and thereafter the whole will be montaged on the outward sloping wall. This image will be enhanced by duodji elements like the brass rings on the hand’s fingers and a real walking stick on the lower part of the wall, fastened to the wooden slates.²⁰

Some may not accept AAhkA and others of Pieski's composed and machine-produced artworks as products of duodji in the strict and traditional sense. However, duodji has always utilised the tools and materials that are available.²² So does Pieski; she brings duodji practice and thinking from her home and her land into new public and political contexts. She explains the historical roots and the process of making, and through her artworks articulates deep care for the future.

Duodji is a message
From top to bottom, AAhkA represents a broad aspect of Sámi duodji and comprises historical as well as spiritual features based on a traditional Sámi worldview. Some visual elements in AAhkA are known, however their deeper meaning and the world they evoke are available only to the few. AAhkA is thus more than decoration. In Southern Sámi this is called tjaalehtjimmie, according to duojár and art historian Maja Dunfjeld. Tjaalehtjimmie is ‘ornamentation with a narrative purpose in addition to being decorative’.²² This ornamental language can be considered a double-coded aesthetics that has been used as a decolonial strategy. ‘Duodji is a message which opens to those who can read it’, as formulated by Sámi author Rauni Magga Lukkari.²³

In the case of AAhkA, however, the use of Sámi ornamental elements is not about being exclusionary. Rather, Pieski invites the public to ‘learn to read’ and to take part in the narrative. It is a ‘way to begin the path to reconciliation between nation states and the Sámi’, in her own words.²⁴ AAhkA gathers fragments of the Sámi world in one monumental piece. Through Pieski's former works, which are present across various public spaces throughout the Nordic countries, AAhkA is woven into a wider context. Thus, we may recognise the artwork’s fragments and learn to read its deeper meaning.

The ládjogahpir crowns the top of the pyramidal room and refers directly to the Sámi foremothers, as well as to contemporary rematriation projects.²⁵ The hat, with its characteristic horn at the back of the head, has a complex history and legacy. It was used by women from around 1750 until the end of the 19th century in the northern Sámi area, and is considered to have been a powerful symbol of fertility. However, the horned shape (formed by a fierra, a wooden piece inside the hat’s fabric) was seen as ‘the devil’s horn’, and it was banned and burned by priests and state servants in the name of God and colonisation.²⁶ Some ended up as items in European museum collections. Gaski and Guttorm write in Duodji Reader that ládjogahpir has received renewed interest as a Sámi identity symbol.²⁷ In the A-block, the Sámi female hat will become a prominent symbol at the top of the pyramidal wall's tip, clearly identifying it as a sign of maternal and indigenous pride and power.

The central element foregrounded is the ornamented head of a walking stick with a variety of functions, also used when driving the reindeer through the snow.²⁸ The flat head is characteristic for the sticks used by women. It imbues the figure with maternal authority and stands as a sign of leading the way to sustainable living, guided by Indigenous knowledge. Pieski has made such walking/driving sticks in collaboration with duojárat for the installation Ovdavázzit – Forewalkers. The stick can be seen as ‘indigenous futurism, when the skills of walking in the landscape will be a necessity for surviving in climate crisis’.²⁹ Noticeable is the hand of AAhkA holding the stick firmly, with the rings on her fingers referring to the Sámi jewellery tradition and the protecting function of the brass and silver.

Not so noticeable, though, are the smaller triangles distributed in patterns in the peripheral zones of AAhkA. The changes of colour on Pieski’s sketches adapt to the pyramidal space; the dark blue triangles and white dots at the bottom space rise to warmer red and yellow patterns at the peak. Pieski claims in a public lecture on her work that ‘every single decoration element is a word, and together they create an ornamental story with the language of duodji’, referring specifically to Dunfjeld and her work on the ornaments in the Southern Sámi area.³⁰ As Dunfjeld explains, the old triangular elements may be interpreted as signs: one singular triangle may represent an individual, and a combination of more triangles, a collective. Or one singular triangle may represent a tent or turf hut (goahti/gåetie), and when put together, it may be read as signs of a larger community.³¹ How the triangles are placed together can further tell of different relationships between people, nature, and the divine powers.

‘How you decorate an object is not neutral,’ the Sámi scholar and visual artist Iver Jåks articulated in 1966 in one of the first essays on duodji, exploring its unwritten rules and artistic potential.³² Jåks’ text describes duodji as flexible and always adaptable to contemporary society's current needs. Obviously, Pieski brings Jåks' understanding into the public space of today. Duodji is knowledge, values, and spirituality that has survived despite the Norwegian state's restrictions and ignorance.³³ The way Pieski has decorated the governmental space is not neutral. ‘AAhkA will be an Indigenous monument in the state building where the most important decisions are made.'³⁴ The presence of “Mother Earth” or the Foremother interacts both forcefully and carefully in the political landscape of the government’s quarter. Through Sámi craft and culture, AAhkA brings a message to the future users.

Monumentality of care
Through the transparent wall in the A-block, the guardian AAhkA will oversee the new public urban space in front that is named after the former Norwegian prime minister, Einar Gerhardsen (1897–1987), and designated the “heart” of the government quarter. Interestingly, Pieski points out that her source for the monumental half-portrait of AAhkA is the beloved Sámi musician Mari Boine (1956–). However, in Sámi culture the traditional way of appreciating or remembering individuals is not through monuments, but rather through immaterial expressions, first and foremost in yoik.³⁵ ‘The Sami structures have never been formidable,’ Harald Gaski states, ‘and our cultural monuments are, above all, memories of culture, transmitted orally, as reminders, rather than physical legacies such as a cathedral or statue.'³⁶ However, when given the possibility to make a “formidable monument” in the Norwegian capital, Pieski enlarges the face of a well-known contemporary Sámi “cultural mother”, and equips her with the items of a Sámi material culture. In this way, the monumental portrait merges with our own time and popular culture, without losing its deep historical references. Through social rhetoric, Pieski's monument seeks reconciliation and care — rather than the conflict which has been the most common way of Sámi representation in the Norwegian capital.

AAhkA's figurative representation perceived from a distance dissolves into a sensual wooden relief pattern when closer in. Inside the entrance hall, the work insists on its materiality rather than its Sámi imagery. The wooden wall probably will appear as a vibrant play of lines and colours from ground to apex, perceived differently and as fragmentary, depending on the viewer’s position and movement.

In this fluctuating appearance of the artwork — between the memorable signs, and the sensual surface — the philosopher Gianni Vattimo claims a possibility for a new and “weak” monumentality to happen. One of his basic sentiments is to accept the contemporary societies' need for monuments, even if ‘the increased need for monuments seems to correspond to the impossibility to build new ones’. That acceptance implies avoiding the monumentality of the central power with its cemented truths and values, and rather letting the minor, marginalised, and suppressed come to the fore, as in AAhkA.³⁷ A strategy in Vattimo’s monument is the ornamental 'weakening' of the strong and central figure. Thus, in his thinking, the decorative and material practices of “minor arts” are prioritised over the former “major arts”.

Secondly, Vattimo recognises weak monumentality as an event, as something that is performed, as an ongoing work of memory and thought which can influence the experience of a common reality — at least for the time being. Thus, Vattimo's ‘weak monumentality’ seems to correspond to Widrich's 'performative monument', and even to Pieski's concepts of 'radical softness' and 'fragmented monumentality', which she has used to describe some of her public art projects.³⁸ This kind of monumentality comes into being in shared public space as a living monument, much in the same way as when people gather in their gávttit, gávttehassat³⁹, and experience a colourful community — albeit temporarily.⁴⁰

AAhkA suggests an answer to my initial questions: Can duodji achieve monumentality, and is such monumentality desirable? The decorative fragments of duodji that Pieski incorporates into public buildings ‘offers itself to us’, enhancing and embellishing our surroundings, making reality more ‘tolerable’.⁴¹ This is an act of care that can be seen as one function of the contemporary monument. Moreover, the signs of the marginalised and suppressed Sámi world that AAhkAgathers in the core of the Norwegian capital bring ‘distinct histories and traditions into dialog’, to interact and forge new connections.⁴² This act carries political significance and represents another function of the contemporary monument. AAhkA’s ambition is to foreground the values of care and reconciliation while also serving as a site for political performance, rethinking established and dominant truths, and standing as a guardian of our common future.