Johanna Andersson & Lars Bergman
Johanna Andersson and Lars Bergman are Sámi artists and activists whose collaborative practice merges art and protest. They live and work between northern Sweden and broader Sápmi, addressing cultural appropriation, land rights, and algorithmic colonialism.
ARTIST STATEMENT
“Our work declares that AI is not Indigenous. Protest is not only a refusal of appropriation but an act of creation in itself. By bringing our resistance into the realm of art, we remind the world that culture is not data, and identity cannot be automated.”
AI Is Not Indigenous
AI Is Not Indigenous
AI Is Not Indigenous
AI Is Not Indigenous AI Is Not Indigenous AI Is Not Indigenous
AI Is Not Indigenous (2022-)
AI Is Not Indigenous transforms protest into a sustained artistic practice, confronting algorithmic appropriation and cultural erasure. Their slogans — bold declarations carried into the streets — insist that belonging, ancestry, and resistance cannot be automated. By turning protest signs into artworks, Andersson & Bergman expose how datasets scrape Indigenous forms while stripping away meaning. The work refuses to let culture be reduced to patterns, asserting protest as both resistance and creation.
Their protest is not only a reaction to AI but part of a much longer history of colonial extraction, where Indigenous knowledge has repeatedly been commodified without consent. In the context of today’s dataset economies, the work insists that political resistance itself must be recognized as an art form.
From the anti-AI demonstration in Stockholm: a protester holds a sign reading “AI Is Not Indigenous” — a declaration against algorithmic appropriation of Sámi culture.
The protest sign recontextualized inside the gallery: a demand transformed into an artwork, mirroring how resistance enters cultural institutions.
Demonstrators gather in Stockholm holding banners reading “Sámi Culture Is Not Open Source,” confronting data colonialism masked as innovation.
A quiet act of resistance: the sign “Belonging Cannot Be Programmed” carried through the streets, turning code critique into collective poetry.
Lars Bergman in the studio preparing a new protest sign — continuing the ongoing dialogue between political urgency and artistic form.
5 questions
with Andersson
& Bergman
1. Your protest signs are both political tools and artworks. How do you decide where one ends and the other begins?
We don’t separate them. The sign carried in the street is a demand for recognition; the same sign on a gallery wall becomes a reminder that resistance has its own aesthetic force. Both are gestures of survival, and to us survival is already an artistic act.
2. In EE Journal 2023, you said “AI cannot be Sámi.” Has your perspective shifted since then?
If anything, it has only hardened. The expansion of AI has made the danger clearer — datasets grow hungrier, corporations more entitled, and governments more complicit. The line we drew in 2023 remains: AI can never embody ancestry, because ancestry is not information, it is lived relation.
3. Do you worry that exhibiting the protest signs risks neutralizing their political power?
Always. That tension is unavoidable. But when protest enters the museum, it carries its contradictions with it. We want to show that art spaces cannot neutralize resistance without exposing their own complicity. The risk is part of the work, and we embrace it.
4. How do you respond to those who argue that AI can also be a tool for Indigenous artists?
Tools are never neutral. Yes, an Indigenous artist may choose to use AI, but the frameworks of extraction remain. When culture is scraped without consent and repackaged as “raw data,” it ceases to be collaboration. We insist that our refusal is also a form of practice, just as valid as any embrace of technology.
5. What does resistance look like in ten years, when AI systems are even more pervasive?
Resistance will likely become more subtle, even invisible — coded into silence, absence, refusal to be captured. At the same time, it may grow louder in other spaces: on the streets, in our communities, in our stories. The form will change, but resistance itself cannot be automated away.