WE LIVE
A film by Cannupa Hanska Luger
“We Live is both an entry log from a time/space jump and documentation of a performative land-based action. Wearing sensory muting regalia, the figures use their physical presence to pledge accountability to the land and waters affected by resource extraction and industry.
This video illustrates how Future Ancestral Technologies approaches Indigenous futurism, blending media, place, storytelling and documentation of a living practice. As a short film, it communicates the ethos of Future Ancestral Technologies while evidencing the live actions that the work requires.”
We Live
Future Ancestral Technologies Entry Log
Cannupa Hanska Luger, 2019
Single channel video with audio
Length (02:57)
Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York
“Science fiction has the power to shape collective thinking and serves as a vehicle to imagine the future on a global scale. Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is Indigenous science fiction. It is a methodology, a practice, a way of future dreaming, rooted in a Native American continuum.
Through performance, installation, video and land-based work, the series develops an ongoing narrative in which Indigenous people develop sustainable, migration based technology to live in hyper-attunement to land and water. Within the limitless time jumps of Future Ancestral Technologies, Luger challenges our collective thinking to imagine a post-capitalist, post-colonial future where humans restore their bonds with the earth and each other. Luger reclaims and recontextualizes the technology of his ancestors by placing the past and the future in dialogue to demonstrate the interconnected relationships between human beings and the land. The artist asks us to consider how we will dream of our collective future.”
Audio Transcript:
Eighty cycles ago, half the population left this planet. They created huge ships and in the process, mined massive chunks of our planet to develop the raw materials into these arcs. They left a lot of devastation behind but what they took with them was this notion of colonization. The colonizer has left. What remains here are the Indigenous populations and those too poor to afford a seat on that ship, those who work the earth, those who remember still the songs that ring out and tell us that we belong to it rather than it belonging to us. We are developing new cultures from that space. There are new ceremonies that are being created. These ceremonies, they start off as rituals, individuals going to locations of heavy extraction. Going to places that have been corrupted and injured by the efforts of the colonizer to leave this planet. And we go there in our human form and apologize. We say we are sorry. We are sorry for the human species. And with these ceremonies, new regalias are developed. Regalias that blind us and make us deaf and prevent us from talking. They remove all the senses that we invested in as human beings and force us to feel once again. Where the land itself becomes the choreographer of elaborate songs and dances, dances in these places that need our apologies; that before they heal, need to feel as though we recognize our folly. These are offerings. Offerings we leave stretched out across this planet in many different forms. All of the notions of land ownership are gone. We Live nomadic. We Live simple. We Live.
Cannupa Hanska Lugar is featured in the FUTURO VOL II edition
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