Culture Sensitive Participatory Art as Visual Ethnography in the North

The article discusses how community-based environmentalart has used to help Northern and Arctic peoples to communicate their own visual and eco-social environmental culture by analyzing it from the inside. Artistic activity draws its content from the northern places, while combining traditional, non-artistic working methods and Sami indigenous practices with dialogical and relational contemporary art. Often the processes are parallel and overlapping with the methods of visual ethnography. The article presents the premises, processes, and execution of two artistic projects: Kirkkokuusikko memorial (2009) in Lapland, Finland as an example of an artist personal effort, and selected examples of the result of long term collaboratively and multidisciplinary winter art development (2003-2016) in Northern Scandinavia and Russia. These projects shed light on the interaction between the environmental art practises, visual ethnography and decolonizing effect of community based participatory approaches in the North.