(some reflections on the Britta Marakatt-Labba show Moving the Needle)

I sat on a deep stone ledge bounding the enormous terrace of the Norway National Museum, stretched out under midsummer cloud, feet dangling. Two seconds later security appeared in a black uniform with badges.

“One foot on the ground at all times” he said. I obeyed.

He smiled and continued: “Norway is a rich country, and they think ‘how can we achieve 100% employment?’ The answer is through imagination. Imagine if you lift both feet you turn into a levitating cat!”

He gestured up to the sky, at the possible aerial pathway of a levitating cat.

“Now we need a rule to prevent that; and now I have a job.”

Inside, the museum is also teeming with security. Not bored security on a stool in the corner, but proactive security with cop tools on their belts.

I notice the cops because in the show I am seeing the cops are everywhere on the walls; tiny figures embroidered in black thread.

Britta Marakatt-Labba is a Sámi textile artist and in what is probably her most famous work Garjját (The Crows) a flock of crows transforms into uniformed police descending on protesters. It was inspired by the activism of the 70s and 80s protesting Norwegian watercourse developments (which eventually went ahead), but its meaning and motif has been revived throughout the decades since, including in 2023 environmental demonstrations (against projects that will also go ahead).

The work is indigenous activism wrapped in traditional women’s work, things that the establishment art world ignored (and continues to diminish) for longer than is defensible. Now 72 years old, Marakatt-Labba finally ‘made it’ in a 2017 show, but she has been practicing all her life.

Marakatt-Labba uses embroidery to tell stories about the Sámi heritage and way of life and to campaign for environmental protections. Her works are delicate and irreverent, and the symbology of the illustrations instantly attracts me: cosmic and ordinary. Her 24-metre tapestry at the centre of the show is a story, or several stories, of Sámi life, put together in an overlapping sequence. In other words it is a history; Historja as the work is called. Impossible to comprehend as a single whole (yes like history), the small scale of the detail requires getting up close to each moment, seeing the threads, at which point the security guards briskly tell me to step away from the wall.

At the time, Oslo midsummer, I walked around the show kind of quickly, big-tiny embroidered vignettes of Sami life were appealing but I felt like I understood them easily. Yet a month later I’m here, Melbourne midwinter, thinking about the attributes of her art (art in general): material, place, having something to say.

When Marakatt-Labba says “go straight to the material and find your story there, your work of art” she is humbling artists everywhere with the reminder that neither their material nor their story are inventions imagined or sweated into existence but that art-making is the speaking/writing of a single-use language to momentarily connect the two. She is also shoving art-making into the action of craft: go straight to the material; do not attempt to speak your language untethered from an action, a daily process, cause and effect, a structural possibility, risk, and failure. Each piece has its “vuogas calbmái” (its aesthetically appealing usefulness), and each practice has its back-face-of-the-cloth, showing the physical and temporal pathway taken to reveal the story (that you didn’t invent) in the material (that you didn’t make).

Historja is 24m long and just 40cm high, impossible to take in as an image, requiring closeness to see each brief part while filtering out the whole. It doesn’t take quantum physics to know that this format is how life is experienced and how meaning is made — in place, one foot on the ground face-to-face; and that this format is a conception of flattened-out non-linear non-scalar time that connects small planetary and small human moments such that you don’t have to try so hard to elevate the ordinary into the universe or shout “fibonacci” and give yourself a migraine flipping between microscopic and cosmic lenses, but instead accept the overlap of every scale and every time separate, together, held in the one geologic place.

Do you remember how generative art’s very strange blip into investment-grade, overlapping with the (hopefully more prolonged) blip of self-releasing, brought a whimsical side-effect in the form of the Art-Blocks-artist’s Project Statement? An unedited musing on the potency of their RGB pixel lines and the mint function as a kind of reveal of the universe? Desperate to levitate.

There is another group of artists using the blockchain not simply as a storage medium / directory, or as a method of dissemination or as a random hash generator, but as the material itself and the place itself (ethereum as digital art city - social, cultural, networked), and despite the medium’s newness and technological invention they embed deep into a tangible and human place (one foot on the ground) by carefully exploring its back-face-of-the-cloth. How it’s made, for whom, and why that matters.

But there is (or was) also a certain criteria in the same cultural space that reveres blockchain artwork that is about its own token transaction or market activity. Artworks about themselves, a shrinking spiral of things to say, a tragedy. Like a poster for a missing cat.

Each thread in Historja represents a tactile everyday reflection of Sámi life in the arctic. Marakatt-Labba seems to butt away attempts at interpretation; she illustrates reindeer not because is it actually about cosmic time and the patterns connecting their hooves to the entire universe, but because “this is how life is”. 24 metres of images and stories because this is just how life is: Are we missing the point? For five decades of practice, each tiny stitch is moved by her single-minded focus on the conservation of Sami life and land. That’s why the show is called Moving the Needle: Something to say, said over and over in this specific language and frequency till a moment of breakthrough.