The Least Broken Places
An ethnic tribe and a digital nomad radically reinterpret the spaces we inhabit.
PART I: Defining Spaces
‘I see life as a passageway, with no fixed beginning or destination. We tend to focus on the destination all the time and forget about the in-between spaces.’
—Do Ho Suh, Passage/s exhibition, Victoria Miro Gallery, London.
We experience life through a series of spaces: physical and metaphysical, architectonic and semantic. All four are deeply interdependent, forming the foundational pillars on which our existence as embodied, empiricist beings depends. But the last of these, language, is perhaps most vital of all.
Consider the Sámi, Europe’s only indigenous community, whose linguistic lineage stretches back some four thousand years. Their enclaves may be found on the Kola Peninsula in Russia, the northernmost tip of Finland, parts of Sweden as far south as Idre, and the adjacent area of Norway’s rocky coast, resulting in nine distinct language variants that are remarkable not only for their diversity but their beauty, their exactitude in…
