Jonah'

Presentation of the Project

Project title: „ Jonah’ “

Background of the work

The Sami are often considered Europe’s last so-called “first people”. They live in Lapland, an area that is nowadays divided by the most northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola-Peninsula in Russia. For centuries the Sami have been subject of discrimination and abuse by the dominant cultures claiming possession of their lands right unto the present day.

Yet to this day, Sami are being forced to choose the specific identity of the country within whose declared borders the Sami land lies and adopt that country's values at the expense of their own culture.

As I started my project, my initial intention was to document the drastic lifestyle changes that Sami reindeer herders are going through today. I met a Reindeer-Sami family from Kuttainen, a small village at the boarder of Swedish and Finnish Lapland. The family agreed to let me participate in their everyday life and so I travelled several times to Lapland during the following year in order to work on my project. During my second journey, however, the father of the family was diagnosed with cancer. The situation within the family, but also between the family and other people including myself, became very tense. As I considered giving up my project, I realised, that I couldn’t abandon the family just like that, as I was already too involved. The father died a few months after being diagnosed, leaving his wife and his eleven year old son Jonah’ to their fate. The fathers’ death was especially hard for the boy as the two had maintained an extremely symbiotic relationship.

It was then, when I decided to turn my project into a very personal and intimate family story, making Jonah’ becoming the main actor.

Nevertheless my work is not merely a story about a boy who lost his father.

Jonah’ stands for a whole generation of Reindeer-Sami. Trying to oscillate between two worlds, this young generation has to create a new identity, oscillating between a traditional, semi-nomadic lifestyle, that is very close to nature and extremely embedded in clan-dominated social structures on one side, and the individualistic, highly industrialised and technocratic lifestyle of a capitalist economy on the other side.

Personal background

My name is Annina Oliveri, I am thirty-one years old. Having finished my anthropology degree, I studied photography at 'Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie' in Berlin.Luga

The linguistic and empirical approach, characteristic to anthropology, often remains rather theoretical and distant. For me, photography bears the chance of overcoming the boarders of academic language, creating a more direct and sometimes maybe more honest access to the people in focus, as it offers the possibility of a different look to life - regardless of culture, education, age or language.