Johtingeaidnu - The Path Within

by Emilia Tikka, Oula A. Valkeapää and Leena Valkeapää

Johtingeaidnu - The Path Within (2025) brings together two worlds: reindeer nomadism in the Arctic Sápmi region and the bioscience of epigenetics. The artwork speculates on a different kind of science that stems from the relationality of time and the relations of the nomadic reindeer worlds. It engages with the concept of shared embodied memories carried within humans, reindeer, and Johtingeaidnu – the ancestral migratory paths. The exhibition showcases the results of a long-term collaboration between artist-researcher Emilia Tikka, reindeer herder Oula A. Valkeapää, and artist-researcher Leena Valkeapää. The installation consists of films, objects, and stories in which migratory paths, along with the bodies that inhabit them, carry traces of pasts and possible futures.

The artwork is set in the lands of Sápmi. There, the centuries-old practice of nomadic reindeer husbandry has faced numerous challenges throughout its history: first, from settlers and borders, while today, climate change and the expansion of infrastructure and tourism threaten the ancestral migration paths. Rather than illustrating the end of nomadic reindeer husbandry, the artwork envisions a hopeful future emerging from the ruins of contemporary worlds.

One of the stories invites us into Oula A. Valkeapää’s reindeer worlds where relationships with Arctic flowers, stones, rivers, and technological objects come alive in daily practices. Using an action camera to film his everyday life with the reindeer, his video illustrates how the past intertwines with his contemporary life through embodied memories – as echoes of lives lived along the now lost migratory paths.

The second story is a short film directed by Emilia Tikka, set in a speculative future after a climate catastrophe. However, it is not a story told in linear time: In this world, the epigenetic memories of past nomads are alive and carried within reindeer bones and migratory paths. The story follows a bioscientist who has come to the Arctic to find new techniques of remembering.

The research-driven artwork is based on collaborative storytelling and filmmaking between 2021 and 2024. Artists use speculation as a methodology, paradoxically, to make visible relationships that are, in fact, real in the reindeer world. They simultaneously engage with contemporary research on epigenetics, which shows how embodied experiences can be inherited across generations. Drawing on living relations within contemporary reindeer worlds and bioscientific research, the artwork materializes a world in which epigenetic memories are not only shared between humans, but carried within the ancestral migratory paths. Rather than separating the divergent worlds and knowledges, the exhibition weaves them together as stories of new practices of remembering in time and space where past, present, and hopeful futures intertwine.

»Johtingeaidnu – The Path Within« is a collaboration of Schering Stiftung with the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity« at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as part of the ＿matter Festival 2025. The research-based artwork has been previously supported by the Kone Foundation and Bioart Society, Finland.

The installation will premiere at Schering Stiftung in Berlin in 10th of April 2025: https://scheringstiftung.de/en/projektraum/emilia-tikka-matters-of-activity/

The exhibition is part of the Matter_Festival: https://www.matters-of-activity.de/en/activities/16051/johtingeaidnu-the-path-within