This text was published in the exhibition publication at ‘Johtingeaidnu – The Path Within’ by Emilia Tikka with Oula A. Valkeapää and Leena Valkeapää. Berlin, Schering Stiftung, 2025.
Thinking about genes is also a way to think about limits and moldability. When we think about genes, we think about how what we are is not predetermined nor is it completely open. Our bodies carry our histories within them. The possibilities of genetic engineering, then, are often attached to hopes about changing destiny, in some way. If we could reach the past in the present, find it stored somewhere, maybe we could alter what has been given to us.
Yet, new technologies like genetic engineering usually come to us pre-packaged: with pre-set notions about what they are for, who they are for, what could be done with them. The politics of imagination inherent in these technologies have to do with how they solidify some ways of making, for example, the gene matter. How to then imagine otherwise? Tikka, Valkeapää and Valkeapää’s work takes on this task. In the future they imagine, knowledge of genetics and biotechnology is placed amid indigenous ways of life and a world where human histories are shared with other, nonhuman creatures.
Many critics have argued that cultural understandings of genetics tend to reflect, and reify, notions of an individual as a bounded, separate being. Through evolution, we have come to be fixed organisms, fixed species, fixed populations – or so we often seem to think. It is our genetics that separates us from other beings – reindeer, lichen, or birds that migrate and return every season.
This idea of separateness does not seem to hold water anymore in a world that is facing escalating ecological crises. It is increasingly clear that our fate as humans is bounded with that of other beings. Meanwhile, discoveries in epigenetics have challenged some of the customary assumptions about genetics and the boundedness of individuals and species. These discoveries have inspired biologists and artists and scholars alike to reimagine what it might mean to be an ecological being.
Epigenetics, roughly, refers to an approach in biology that takes the phenotype, the observable form of the organism, rather than the gene, as its starting point in studying developmental change. Studies in this area have shown how processes that happen outside the genome can result in changes in the organism’s observable characteristics, and how these changes might be heritable; how environmental stressors, like famines, can have lasting physical effects generations later. This is in contrast with how assumptions about how inheritable changes in the genome can only happen through mutations and evolutionary selection. Yet, we learn more and more about how environments can influence organisms much shorter spans of time. To be clear, this does not mean that these new discoveries are about to replace older knowledge about genetics. Rather, epigenetics can be seen as a way to extend our understanding of biology. Epigenetic understanding of bodies sees them as more porous and directly influenced by the world around them.
Being more porous to environmental signals might also mean that lines between species can become blurred. If change, memory, and transfer of information across generations can also happen outside the genome, what does this mean for who we count among our ancestors? People, reindeer and the landscape itself could, perhaps, all participate in the same embodied histories. Tikka, Valkeapää and Valkeapää’s work imagines epigenetic inheritance as a sort of body memory that connects the reindeer, their herders, and the landscape that supports their ways of life. The way cells store signs from the past is harnessed to bring back forgotten memories from across time and across species. This suggests a transcorporeality extending across species boundaries. In this way, their work also draws on how scholars like Donna Haraway have pointed out how what we are is always a multispecies affair. Being human is becoming with our companion species – in this case, reindeer whose migratory paths through the landscape have also defined the homelands of their herders, with little mind to national borders drawn by people.
The Sámi author Johan Turi has compared the lives of reindeer and nomadic reindeer herders to those of migrating birds. The way reindeer and their herders inhabit a landscape, the way they dwell in it, is marked the cyclicality of time in nature: how Earth’s orbiting of the sun makes itself known to the inhabitants of the landscape. Turi speaks of a sense of that is attached to the landscape itself. It is ever changing but constant, and constantly shared with other creatures.
Perhaps there is a memory that arises from this shared landscape. And what if we could access that ancestral body memory, stored somewhere within our cells? Maybe we could regain something that has been lost long ago? Tikka, Valkeapää and Valkeapää’s work imagines a future where climate change has profoundly altered the living environments of people and reindeer. The kinds of losses that are brought about by fast changing environments are not just about losing particular species, but entire ways of life and worlds of meaning. Yet, the past is within us. Tikka, Valkeapää and Valkeapää’s work also suggests a role for technology in this future: not as a saviour or as a destroyer of worlds, but as a tool used in specific landscapes for a specific purpose. There is hope, but it is a hope of living with the ruins – not waiting for some utopian state of being, but living with what the past makes possible now.
mariannemakelin.com 