Indigenous artivism for visual sovereignty, defined here as self-determination imagined, has recently caught the attention of the general public in Norway, Sweden and Finland and has been addressed in Sámi scholarship as a decolonising methodology, reshaping discourses on racism and the colonial present in the Nordic countries. Such artistic, social, and political activism attempts to bring the national majorities into a critical conversation through strategies of exposure, shaming, and destabilising the subject-object divide in the colonial relations of the state to the indigenous, the developer to the land, and the researcher to the informant.

Without the backdrop of a jurisprudence of territorial sovereignty, such art practices in Northern Europe seem more akin to a relational visual ontology as outlined in Ariella Azoulay’s work on the civic duty of spectatorship and photography’s civil contract (Azoulay 2008), than to the key strands in the contemporary literature on indigeneity and visual sovereignty in Canada and the US.

Artistic instantiations of indigeneity in South and Central America may also contribute to a comparative examination of the capacity of the visual sovereignty literature to address (and, more importantly, redress) social relations in settler-colonial contexts other than North America. Based on the author’s experiences from studying indigenous peoples’ social movements in Sweden and Guatemala, and of learning about his own positionality through relations of friendship, animosity and game-changing ethical challenges in ethnographic research, this paper probes the power of relational visual art and photography to forge a space of political possibility beyond the trope of sovereign imageries.

Azoulay, Ariella 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books.