Márkomeannu-2018/2118 at the Convergence of Fiction and Reality: Art, Performance, and Storytelling Between Pasts and Futures in a Land of Relations

This chapter addresses the relationship between the Márku-Sámi and the Márku (an inland area on the Norwegian side of Sápmi) through the lenses of the Márkomeannu festival, an annual event held at Gállogieddi (Stuornjárga, Norwegian side of Sápmi) since the early 2000s. Unlike previous festival editions, Márkomeannu-2018 was organized around a “festival plot” which merged fiction and reality by setting the festival 100 years in the future. This narrative device, a Sámi articulation of Indigenous Futurism, offers important insights into Sámi youth’s concerns over the ramifications of climate change, Indigenous sovereignty, and cultural survival and acknowledgment. Implemented through site-specific art and a participative theater performance, the festival plot also functioned as a programmatic statement concerning the position of the Márku in the symbolic geography of Sápmi by affirming the centrality of Gállogieddi—the farmstead-cum-museum where Márkomeannu is held—in contemporary Sámi and Nordic societies.