Marte Somby’s The Voiceless

My name is Marte Lill Somby. I’m from Karasjok in Norway, and I work together with Jukke Rosing from Nuuk, in Greenland, on a project called De Sprogløse (The Voiceless). We met in 2017 and figured out early that we had a lot in common when it comes not to speak our mother tongue, how we felt of being in between culture and the reindeer herders station that was in Itinnera, in the Nuuk fjord in Greenland.

For the project, we decided to use the photograph as our common way of working together and tell our story. You cannot capture the language or being voiceless on a camera, but we can capture the feelings of our experience, vulnerabilities, and parts of the culture. For Sámi and Inuits, the nature, it’s not just there. It’s a part of everyday life, and it’s a part of our project as well. My approach was working on different series that had different meaning.

So in the work In the way (Ligger i veien), I have four photos that are about the reindeer herding culture, the culture that I was not a part of. My family ended the reindeer herding husbandry at the end of the sixties. Since I didn’t get to learn the Sámi language from my father, and we moved out from the Sámi core area, I have often had to prove that I am Sámi in Sámi areas, and since I don’t have the language, I feel like I’m in the way of my own people because the language has been taken back and has been given a different status today. Also in the photo you can see that they have traditional Sámi shoes on with blue shoe covers, and this small detail is a hint about the climate change.

For the other work, Horn (Čoarvi), the death pit, it’s from another series of six photographs, which is about the death and how traditions change through new generations. My father died when I was three years old, which is one of the reason we moved, and he could never change his mind about learning me the language.

The horn is from Itinnera, from a pit that they used to throw away horns after slaughtering the reindeers. And my uncle worked at the reindeer herding station for two years in the sixties, and he died not long after he came back. So the building, the history, and the fragments from the past remains.