Homo Sapiens and My People is my farewell letter and my liberation from colonialism. Through the music I say goodbye to the narrow-minded image that history has forced my expression into. I say goodbye to the racist abuses that the Sami were subjected to in the name of science when the racial biology institute was founded in 1921 and Professor Herman Lundborg began his clear racist mapping of the Samipeople.
I want the music to be the opposite of the narrowness of history, where people were placed in different boxes with few or no opportunities to break the norm, I want through music to be free. I want to create a cross-border soundscape where the closeness between different expressions is as obvious as necessary. With music, I want to break down the barriers that keep us humans apart…
The title Homo Sapiens and My People is inspired by Carl von Linné who was a scientist with a great interest in Sápmi. He made several expeditions to Sápmi where he mapped plants and divided them into species, Linné developed the classification system for all spieces. Homo sapiens (humans) was considered as the “wise man” or the rational humanbeing. Many see his classification system as the starting point for the scientific racism that later led to the establishment of the Racial Biology Institute in Sweden.
As a artist and a person I want to be free, as boundless as the horizon where a bluish-white mountain meets a bluish-white sky, where no-one can decide where the earth ends and the sky begins. The contours are blurred and replaced by a free landscape where everything is possible.
