Joar Nango is an artist and architect from the Sami people – Indigenous to the territory now divided between Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. His way of thinking about the construction of spaces, evidenced in his works, reveals a knowledge rooted in practices intertwined with everyday life, as opposed to technical and formal knowledge. The architecture proposed by Nango stems from a long-standing relationship with the environment and from the knowledge imbued in the Sami way of life.

Based on appropriation and hybridization, the ephemeral and nomadic structures of the Sami peoples make use of traditional materials and techniques, such as animal skins, fabrics, and untreated and natural wood, as well as industrial elements and scrap metal, adapted to each context’s requirements. The use of these architectural solutions in Nango’s work reveals a living tradition, similar to a moving watercourse: it molds itself to the variations in the terrain, mixes with other bodies of water, but maintains a continuous flow.

Dubbed by the artist with the concept of indigenuity (Indigenous ingenuity), this architectural intelligence dismantles dichotomies between technological progress and ancestral knowledge, while at the same time reclaims practical creativity and traditional knowledge as legitimate and sophisticated ways of building the world.

At the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Nango is presenting an offshoot of the Girjegumpi project, developed over about ten years. It is a Sami architecture library, a nomadic space for socializing and collaboration that brings together publications on art, architecture, design, activism, decolonial theories, and Sami knowledge. Incorporating elements from the local context, the work brings together the knowledge, bibliography, and construction techniques of Indigenous peoples, quilombolas, and manguebeat, as well as materials collected in the vicinity of the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion. The space, which is permeable, tactile, and geared toward conviviality, is made up of shelves housing books on territorial rights, animal time, and ancestral knowledge, built with materials in direct dialogue with the content they support.

By combining tradition and contemporaneity, the artist challenges the paradigms of formal and industrial architecture, proposing instead a logic of adaptation, reuse, and appropriation as a political tool. His work subverts the residues and the logic of Western consumption into ingenious solutions, through a strategy of resistance that makes use of the incorporation and repurposing of materials, symbols, and signs from dominant cultures.