When Sámi meet Yami
1979 to 2023 — half a century of archives
Hans maps have no borders, only rivers and mountains. Perhaps that is why a friendship could cross half a century and eight thousand kilometres without expiring.
In 1979, the Sámi artist Hans Ragnar Mathisen came to Taiwan for the first time. On Lanyu, Orchid Island, a young man named Shimanawan took him home, hosted him for weeks and rode him around the island on the back of a motorbike. Mathisen's maps have no borders, only rivers and mountains. The Sámi world never had them to begin with. In 2022, in a house in Norway, we opened a drawer full of a Taiwan from another era. So we carried it back across the sea. In 2023 the retrospective Sámi Culture | Taiwan Impressions opened in Taipei, and Mathisen, by then seventy-eight, returned to Lanyu to meet Shimanawan again at the end of the flying fish season. Indigenous youth from Taitung performed at the opening, Mathisen taught Sámi printmaking to schoolchildren, and joik singing carried across a Lanyu schoolyard. When he left, he took a Yami name with him: Shibiasonkunakum, a person with a kind heart.
“It is magical to be back to Taiwan”
2022.09 - 2023.05
In collaboration with PCCU /OCA/ NORDISK KULTURFOND / PTS / 椰油國小 / 寶桑國中 / 東華大學