THE TROUBLE WITH JÄKÄLÄ

2018

The Trouble with Jäkälä is a research-creation project developed during the Ars Bioarctica residency at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Research Station of the University of Helsinki in Sápmi (Northern Finland). The project emerged from an initial investigation into Sámi relationships with lichen, but evolved into a study of ecological conflict, conservation policy, and competing ways of understanding landscape.

Working at the intersection of bioart, environmental humanities, and performance, WhiteFeather examined a long-standing dispute between Sámi reindeer herders and station biologists whose ecological research informs government land-use policy. At the centre of this conflict lies lichen: a slow-growing organism that functions simultaneously as ecological indicator, food source, territorial witness, and cultural lifeline.

The project developed the concept of lichenological time—a temporal framework derived from the prolonged life cycles and ecological sensitivities of lichen species native to the region. Through this lens, lichen becomes both archive and witness, slowly accumulating evidence of environmental change, political intervention, and human occupation. Military remnants, border fences, weathered infrastructure, and geological formations become entangled within these extended temporalities.

Embodied field research, including landscape-based performance with reindeer and lichen habitats, formed the basis of a single-channel video work that examines the tensions between scientific management and Indigenous lived knowledge. While conservation biologists often understand lichenological time through models of preservation, growth rates, and ecological compartmentalization, Sámi communities understand lichenological time through migration, subsistence, and intergenerational relationships with the land. Rather than resolving these tensions, The Trouble with Jäkälä positions the landscape as a contested site of knowledge production, asking how different forms of expertise—scientific, cultural, ecological, and embodied—might coexist within environments shaped by both colonial and environmental pressures.

Jäkälä is the Finnish word for lichen.

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Video: [00:13:07], single-channel digital video. High resolution available for screening upon request.

The residency was facilitated by the Finnish Bioart Society in partnership with the Kilpisjärvi Biological Research Station and supported by the University of the Arts Helsinki. Funding was provided by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

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The Trouble with Jäkälä was subsequently presented as a case study in the peer-reviewed article "Horizontal Exchange, Relations, and Resistance in Bioart and Practice-based Research," co-authored by WhiteFeather Hunter, Maya Hey, and Emilie St-Hilaire and published in the Journal international de bioéthique et d'éthique des sciences (2019). 

Publication: DOI: 10.3917/jibes.304.0069