Myggholken [Mosquito Nest]— is an antiquarian bookshop and meeting place that opened in 2011 by Elizabeth Johansson (1955–) and her late husband—the activist, poet and photographer Leif Öhman (1951–2022). The bookshop became an important meeting place for the grassroots organisation Gruvfritt Jokkmokk [Mine-Free Jåhkåmåhkke] between 2013–2019 yet subsequently remained closed to the public for several years due to illness.
In 2017, during the research process of Litte ja Goabddá (2018), I conducted an interview at Myggholkens väntrum with Elizabeth Johansson, Leif Öhman and Sámi Yoiker Lars Guttorm Blind (1945–2019). They narrated the anxiety the mining project posed to the local and Sámi community.
In May 2024, Acosta met Elizabeth for a coffee to understand how the Gállok fight for self-determination connects to land-based struggles stemming from Sweden’s forestry model. That same day, he started cleaning and re-organising the bookshop as a volunteer The Myggoholken has transformed his practive both as methodological framework .
Myggholken connects the history of resistance against Gállok with the current fight to protect the last remaining boreal forests. Together with Elizabeth, we shifted the strong political focus of the collection towards a lighter and more inclusive book display. This began by removing all books that “other”, such as colonial and ethnographic books. Instead, priority has been given to local, Sámi and ecological perspectives.
Myggholken welcomes visitors, including groups and delegations from both Sámi and non-Sámi communities, and we have organized art exhibitions focused on old-growth forests, such as Trees Are Our Parents (2024) by artist Marietta Mamia, and Vuovdek: We Live Among Trees (2025) by Nina Nordvall Vahlberg Myggholken is an inclusive space for knowledge exchange and storytelling around a cup of free coffee. We participate in Regnbågsveckan Jokkmokk [Jokkmokk Rainbow Week], a local LGBTQ+ Pride festival and cultural event held in Jokkmokk since 2024.
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In the summer of 2018, Sweden experienced most severe wildfire season in modern history. The Norrbotten County was one of the most seriously affected areas. While today forest fires are predominantly seen as a symptom of anthropogenic climate change, seasonal fire management has been part of traditional Indigenous land stewardship for thousands of years. During this time, Sámi journalist and documentarian Liz-Marie Nilsen and I supported Jåhkåmåhkke’s firefighters by cooking and distributing food. May-Britt Öhman, Associate Professor in Environmental History at Uppsala University and Lule and Forest Sámi with Tornedalian heritage, participated in the firefighting activities and documented them with photos and short videos. Thiis led to the making of the co-authored video Forest & Fires (Acosta & Nilsen, 2019), in which an elder from a Sámi forest area narrated how their community helped to fight a wildfire in the summer of 1959. This elder was interviewed at the very site of the wildfire and spoke about the Old-Forest People who fought the blaze with a deep understanding of the territory using knowledge acquired during controlled fires conducted after logging and before replanting
The project document, analyse and draw attention to the local and Indigenous/Sámi stewardship of land—with specific regard to fire management, drought, and other aspects of climate change. The project brings forward forest fires t take on wildfires and other extreme events from a local and Indigenous perspective of the Jokkmokk Municipality. Through small forest fire stories, the project develops interviews with elders and knowledge holders on the control of wildfires, some who had practiced the controlled fires before they were banned in the 1960s. Forest people used to learn to deal with the fire by being “in the fire”, by directing fire towards ditches, and using tools such as hosepipes, pans, buckets and shovel. Combined with deep knowledge of the territory, these techniques were used to direct fire towards swap areas. This knowledge that has passed from generation to generation is mostly lost today and replaced with firefighting techniques that uses water as main component, and is distributed through terrestrial and aerial vehicles.
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From the green marble quarries of Tinos to the iron mines of Serifos and the bentonite mines of Milos, the Cyclades’ rich mineral resources have shaped the islands’ social, cultural, and physical environments. Although mining has been prevalent in the region since antiquity, mineral extraction intensified and diversified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Traces of these modern industrial activities are etched into the landscape and collective memory of the island’s communities, anchoring stories of labor struggles, technological advancements, and environmental change. In most cases, the island economies today rely more heavily on tourism than industrial mining. Yet the past, present, and future of mineral extraction in the Cyclades raises urgent questions about economic and environmental sustainability and reveals the interplay of local island histories and identities with global economic, geopolitical, and environmental forces.
Navigating sites of social, historical and geological significance, this photographic series commissioned for Extraction in the Cyclades: Digital Traces project traces a multiplicity of mineral memories across the islands of Tinos, Naxos, Antiparos, Serifos and Milos. Interweaving earthen and archival materialities, the series moves across scales and geographies, linking derelict infrastructures and mineral samples with active open-pit mines and labor struggles. As an excavation of the present and collective remembering of the past, the series evidences the mutable processes by which history is consolidated, communicated and transformed. Images from each of the islands are arranged in five chapters as an interconnected web of relations, encouraging readings between sites and temporalities.
Extraction in the Cyclades: Digital Traces examines these overlapping dimensions of mining and quarrying in the Cyclades, focusing on five islands of varying scale and geological composition with significant extractive activity over the last three centuries: Antiparos, Milos, Naxos, Serifos and Tinos. In partnership with local historians, museums, labor centers and other community partners, Archipelago Network presents a constellation of photographic and audiovisual collections, contributing to dissemination of the historical memory and cultural heritage of mining and quarrying from the late nineteenth century to present day.
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