Design in Between Worlds invites the reader to imagine what sciences and technologies of multiple cosmologies might look like.
Moving beyond categorizations of the modern and the traditional, framings of cultures as either nature-bound or technological, and hierarchies between Indigenous knowledge and life sciences, Emilia Tikka develops design as an intercosmological practice.
The book offers new methodologies for working in between worlds – in ways that maintain their divergence while embracing moments of not-knowing.
The study is based on five years of artistic collaboration within nomadic reindeer worlds in sub-arctic Sápmi, alongside engagements with epigenetic scientists. Films and speculative objects materialize a future world in which transgenerational living relations with reindeer guide new forms of technoscientific practices and land politics.
Read open access here
Photo: Krista Luoma
Johtingeaidnu - The Path Within
Research based artwork by Emilia Tikka, Oula A. Valkeapää and Leena Valkeapää
The artwork brings together two worlds: reindeer nomadism in the Arctic Sápmi region and the bioscience of epigenetics. The artwork speculates on a different kind of science that stems from the relationality of time and the relations within nomadic reindeer worlds.
It engages with the concept of shared embodied memories carried within humans, reindeer, and Johtingeaidnu – the ancestral migratory paths.
More about the project here
I am a Finnish-born postdoctoral design researcher and filmmaker. My work is situated in between technoscience cultures and what is often labelled as indigenous knowledge systems in the Arctic region, focusing on exploring design as an intercosmological practice.
My work explores human relations with nature(s), science, and technology, with a particular focus on the politics of ontology, realities, and relational modes of existence.
My artistic research practice is based on materializing collaborative imaginaries of other worlds in forms of speculative storytelling, filmmaking, and object-making.
More about me and my work here
Still from Johtingeaidnu – The Path Within (2025), cinematography by Eduardo Mattos.