Arctic Silk Road
Sámi-Greenpeace protests against the Arctic Ocean Corridor in Čeʹvetjäuʹrr
Arctic Silk Road is a completed research project funded by the Research Council of Norway ($1.3 million), led by Natalia from 2020 to 2026. It followed the imagination of global infrastructures across time and space. We focused on experiences of planning and anticipating constructions along the “Polar Silk Road” from China to the Circumpolar North in Sápmi, Russia, Canada and other connected sites. Furthermore, we examined comparative cases of large-scale infrastructural networks historical and emerging.
Through collaboration with Sámi artisans and institutions, we followed the social, environmental, and material relations of large-scale infrastructural endeavors, built and non-built, around the world, across Sápmi, and historically, in this way contributing to ongoing discussions of infrastructural impacts in Sápmi and globally. Resulting publications include the volume Arctic Silk Roads: An Anthropology of the Unbuilt (Berghahn) and Material Imaginaries of the New Iron Curtain in Journal of Material Culture.