Johtingeaidnu - The Path Within

by Emilia Tikka with Oula A. Valkeapää and Leena Valkeapää

The artwork Johtingeaidnu - The Path Within (2025), brings together two worlds: reindeer nomadism in Arctic Sápmi and biosciences on epigenetics. It engages with the concept of shared embodied memories, carried within humans, reindeer and in Johtingeaidnu – the ancestral migratory paths. The exhibition premieres the results of a long-term collaboration between artist-researcher Emilia Tikka, reindeer herder Oula A. Valkeapää and artist-researcher Leena Valkeapää. The artwork consists of films and objects as 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 Arctic lands of Sápmi. Here, the centuries-old practice of nomadic reindeer husbandry has faced numerous challenges throughout its history: first from settlers and borders, and today from climate change and the expanding infrastructure and tourism that threaten the ancestral migration paths. The artwork does not illustrate an end to nomadic reindeer herding practices, instead it envisions a hopeful future arising from the ruins of contemporary worlds.

One of the stories invites us into Oula A. Valkeapää 's reindeer world where relationships with arctic flowers, stones, rivers and technological objects become alive in daily practices. Using an action camera to film his everyday life with the reindeer, the 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. 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 for remembering. 

The research-driven artwork is based on methodologies of collaborative speculative design and filmmaking during 2021 - 2024. Drawing from living relationships within contemporary reindeer worlds and bioscientific research, the artwork materializes a world where epigenetic memories are shared between humans and reindeer, and carried within the ancestral migratory paths -Johtingeaidnu. Rather than separating the divergent worlds, the exhibition weaves them together as stories of new practices of remembering in places where past, present and hopeful futures intertwine. 

The project has been advised by Professor Miriam Liedvogel, (epigenetics of animal migration), Professor Oded Rechavi (transgenerational epigenetic memories) and others. Johtingeaidnu - The Path Within is a collaboration with the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity« at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as part of the __matter Festival 2025. The production of the artwork has been previously supported by Finnish Kone Foundation and Bioart Society/Art4med. 

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