Joar Nango | My Father’s Lifestyle. 2014
Joar Nango, one of only a few practicing Sámi architects. Born in 1979, he now lives and works in Tromsø, and his people are reindeer herders from Sápmi, the traditional Sámi territory that covers northern Norway and parts of Sweden, Finland, and northwestern Russia. Their lives have long been predicated on the necessity of improvisation—skills learned when you are always on the move. “The competence of improvisation,” Nango clarifies, is a “cultural attitude of building/design traditions that exists within many northern Indigenous cultures where resources are scarce and the climate unpredictable, harsh, and unmerciful… . You can especially see it in the way the seminomadic reindeer herders arrange their workspace, their backyards, or their camps, while traveling with the herds between grazing lands.”