Co.Lab Gallery presents
LEGACIES | PERINNOT
SAMIRA SARAMO & ZOE GORDON
EXHIBITION OPENS THURS JUNE 12, 7-10PM
Show Closes June 29th
Legacies / Perinnöta is photographic and sound installation about Finnish settlement, extractive industry, and colonialism in Northern Ontario, Canada.
In the summer of 2022, researcher-photographer Samira Saramo and sound artist Zoe Gordon travelled 2100 km together, seeking the sounds, feelings, and places of Finnish migrant-settler histories in Northern Ontario. In this region, Finnish migrants have laboured, established homes, set down family and community roots, and shared stories that situated them within the landscape. Yet, this exploratory road trip demonstrated how the nostalgia of Finnish settlement and “settler homemaking” (Tuck and Yang 2012, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”) are intimately entangled with the complicated legacies of logging, mining, and the railroad. This exhibit draws attention to the ways Finnish migrant-settler heritage has grown hand in hand with ecological and colonial violences, and the booms and busts of extractive industries.
Photographs, texts, and installation: Samira Saramo
Sound composition: Zoe Gordon
Samira Saramo is Senior Research Fellow at the Migration Institute of Finland and holds Title of Docent (Associate Professor) in Cultural History at the University of Turku. Samira’s transdisciplinary work centers on Finnish North American histories in the contexts of place, settler colonialism, the environment, and life narratives. Samira is very interested in bringing together arts and research to build new understandings and ways of communicating the past. For example, she has facilitated community creative writing and “mapping” workshops that explore identity, heritage, and place. This is Samira’s second artistic exhibit. Her first photography exhibit, “Finnish Pasts and Presents and in the U.S. Midwest” (2018 Turku, 2019 Jyväskylä), explored the power of feeling in place, a theme she has also written about in the article “Archives of place, feeling, and time: Immersive historical field research in the (Finnish) U.S. Midwest.” Since then, she has been expanding her artistic practice to installation. Samira grew up as a settler on Anishinaabe lands in Canada (hometown Thunder Bay), but returned to Finland in 2015.
Zoe Gordon is a media artist focused on sound, and she runs a sound studio, Cricket Cave, in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Intermedia, Film and Video from Emily Carr University, and collaborates on media projects with filmmakers, musicians, and artists for independent release and broadcasters. Some of the films she has worked on have shown nationally and internationally, including at Sundance Film Festival, ImagineNATIVE Film Festival, Hot Docs, Crave TV, and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Her most recent film, The Moth, co-written/directed/produced with Michelle Derosiers premiers at ImagineNATIVE in 2025. Additionally, she is a community arts producer. She was a production coordinator for Tangled Art + Disability's programming in Thunder Bay for 4 years and worked with Community Arts and Heritage Education Project to deliver arts programming to youth in their Arts to the Streets program for 5 years. Her personal practice is focused on embodiment, listening and environmental recording. Zoe is a settler living in the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, part of the Robinson Superior treaty. Her ancestors come from across Europe, including Finland.
This exhibit is funded by Kone Foundation.
