Pauliina Feodoroff (nominated by Eva Maria Fjellheim), is a Skolt Saami theatre director, filmmaker, feminist and queer activist, artistic researcher and land guardian from the Finnish/Russian side of Sápmi, the Saami homelands. For instance, she has been working to call out injustices by the logging industry, which causes deforestation on Saami reindeer herding land and destruction of river ecosystems and ancestral Saami fishing practices. Her work centers around anti-colonial critique and praxis, advocating for Indigenous feminism, Sámi ancestral livelihoods (reindeer herding and fishing) and knowledges, and LGTBQ visibility.
She uses diverse artistic representations as main working method. Her artistic work is based on research and deep knowledge, and she uses art/aesthetics and inter-generational approaches to build and disseminate knowledge. She thus engages with both creative methods and scholarly work to protect the Saami ancestral landscape and livelihoods. Her work is powerfully situated in an Indigenous feminist and queer positionality. Her artistic research-activism challenges positivist and conventional academic knowledge production, as she provides otherwise forms of knowledge, methodologies and dissemination in a still colonial Nordic/Russian Sámi context.
Her activities are many: filmmaking, performing, poetry, book contributions. In 2022, she took part in shaping and performed ‘Matriarchy’ at The Sámi Pavilion at the 59th Biennale in Venice. For the first time in history, the ‘Nordic Pavilion’ was transformed into the ‘Sámi pavilion’.
