Traces, Absences, and Distortions in Emilie Demant Hatt’s Representations of Sámi Life

The essay investigates a selection of Danish visual artist Emilie Demant Hatt’s art and writings and traces her fascination with the Indigenous world view that she encountered during her stay with Sámi reindeer herders in Sápmi in the early twentieth century. As a woman and amateur anthropologist with North Sámi language skills who lived with Sámi transhumant families over a longer period and moreover developed a close collaboration with the Sámi artist Johan Turi, Demant Hatt had nuanced and varied insights into daily life and was inspired by Sámi aesthetics and ontologies. These inspirations, which were outside the mainstream monologue of the colonial adventurer, opened up space for dialogue in the Arctic contact zone. Coupling Demant Hatt’s work to contemporary artistic practices and gendered experience and combining interpretations of her texts and artworks with some historical contextualization, the essay examines how the Sámi use of context-bound metaphors and figurative speech, duodji aesthetics, and a relational ontology (described as “animism”) sharpened Emilie Demant Hatt’s awareness of the significance of context, interconnectedness, and embeddedness in both her visual and textual production. It reveals also how Demant Hatt in her representations of Sámi ways of life performs a delicate but dangerous balancing act between valorizing a different culture, replicating colonial fantasies, and struggling with her own experiences of gendered oppression in modern society.