Through the mounting challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been greater violence, incarceration, and surveillance of Indigenous communities, land and water defenders, as well as agrarian resistances. In this session, we invite participants to foreground their practices toward ecological justice, Indigenous leadership, and the role of public culture in addressing Rights to self-determination, traditional knowledge, as well as planetary toxicity. GB13 participant, artist, and activist Cian Dayrit speaks about artistic strategies of communal mapping with agrarian and Indigenous communities in the Philippines within ensuing land and resource struggles. Activist and Sámi nature guardian Beaska Niillas shares his strategies of boycott, moratorium, legal cases to protect land and water resources, as well as expanded alliances with Indigenous activists in other parts of the world. Working on institution-building against systemic violence, curator and critic Marian Pastor Roces draws on Indigenous custodianship and cultural vocabularies of oral histories, collective memory, and material inheritance.

Cian Dayrit is an artist based in Manila. His work investigates notions of power and identity as they are represented and reproduced in monuments, museums, maps and other institutionalized media. The works often respond to different marginalized communities, encouraging a critical reflection on colonial and privileged perspectives. His projects which combine archival references, protest imagery and grassroots counter-mapping show how the empire scored out the maps of the modern world, how its aftermath perpetuates industrial development, and how alternative territories might be imagined from the ground-up. Informed by the experience of colonialism from the perspective of the Philippines, Dayrit’s work nonetheless resists being fixed to a specific position or location.

Beaska Niillas is a father of two, Sámi duojár, hunter, gatherer, and nature guardian based in Deatnu in the Norwegian part of Sápmi. For the last ten years, he has been active in Sámi politics and also defended Indigenous land and waters in Sápmi and beyond. He plays a central role in three major projects exploring Sámi sovereignty: ‘Ellos Deatnu!’ (Long live Deatnu!) focusing on Sámi fishing rights; ‘SuperSápmi’, a podcast co-hosted with Sámi fisherman and nature guardian Áslat Holmberg to bring Indigenous knowledges and allied voices on the impact of colonialism on Sámi everyday life; and ‘Siidaskuvla’, a collaborative project by Sámi scholars, artists, and nature guardians who seek to reconstruct the knowledge of the siida (the Sámi community structure). He is the co-curator of the Sámi pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where he joins Katya García-Antón, director of OCA and Sámi researcher Liisa-Rávná Finbog to transform the Nordic Pavilion.

Marian Pastor Roces is an independent curator and critic working across subjects including contemporary art, museums, the politics of identity, clothing and related sign systems, and the failures of the democratic project in many parts of the world. Her current projects include curating the establishment of 21AM, the new contemporary art museum for the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Theoretical and political struggles encountered during curatorial work inform Roces’ theoretical writing, which is published internationally. Roces is currently preparing a finished manuscript for publication on a little-remembered ethnocidal campaign against Muslims, enacted by Christian settlers to the island of Mindanao, immediately before and during the Martial Law Period of the 1970s.