In 2018, New Mexico-based artist Cannupa Hanska Luger set up Future Ancestral Technologies, an ongoing, multidisciplinary project that dreams up possibilities for Indigenous futures. A 2023 installment, Watheca—a Lakota word meaning “leftovers”—created mythic scavengers to populate Luger’s imagined universe.
This autumn, the artist’s work will appear across three PST Art exhibitions. Luger will present a new installation for Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice at the Hammer Museum. Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology at the Autry Museum of the American West will feature wearable sculptures from Watheca. Science Fiction Creates the Future at the New Children’s Museum will include an interactive landscape, developed with an equal eye towards methodology and aesthetics. Luger’s oeuvre suggests a great utopian experiment, invested in radical, hopeful new visions of life on earth.
The Art Newspaper: Tell me about Sovereign, your installation for the Hammer Museum lobby.
Cannupa Hanska Luger: I’m designing three “sovereignty suits” made to protect Indigenous space travellers. Space suits shelter wearers from the environment, and “space” isn’t just outside the planet: we inhabit space, the museum is a space that can be hostile, and we need to carry culture—as necessary as air, shelter and water—through it. I’m also creating a rover figure that is a modified, AI-operated drone, and a teepee with a reflective skin.
Sovereign plays with 1950s Hollywood space tropes and science fiction. Participating in those speculative, imaginative realms, how do we create more sustainable relationships with our environment, solar system and universe?
The spaceman: Luger in the studio creating a clay head for Sovereign, part of his Breath(e): Toward Climate Change and Social Justice exhibition
Courtesy of the artist
There’s also a three-channel film component, isn’t there?
It depicts a view of the land from the museum’s third floor, which will glitch to show the landscape before or after the existence of Los Angeles. Visitors will see the night sky with stars, without buildings and infrastructure.
You’ve worked in Southern California, notably as a co-director and costume designer for the 2020 opera Sweet Land, staged at the State Historical Park in downtown Los Angeles. Your practice is rooted in place, so what is your relationship to the region?
I want to reconsider “place”. “Los Angeles” is several deserts, valleys, rivers and mountains, and those mountains collide into other spaces. Without the limitations of human-constructed borders, you witness a larger network and narrative. What does it mean to be an extension of the land?
You’re also creating work for the New Children’s Museum.
I’m making a “future dreaming space” for a larger exhibition inspired by the archive of [the science fiction author] Octavia Butler. I’m designing an immersive installation meant to be played on, a landscape the audience can transform. The entire surface is Velcro. Kids build trees or homes that they stick onto the landscape. Every day it will change, depending on visitors’ values. Children will see what it means to remove trees to build a home, remove homes to build trees, or remove each other’s homes to plant their own.
Are you worried about a Lord of the Flies situation developing?
Lord of the Flies is a story that inhabits our minds and limits our expectations. This is an opportunity to gather data on what this generation values. This will be a space of play and accident, and homes and trees can be destroyed. How will they adapt?
The museum is a safe place to explore these ideas. I don’t imagine anyone at the museum shaming children for playing in ways that may, on a human scale, be violent or extractive. Everybody’s children are our children, and they’re the planet’s greatest archive. If we expect them to move toward Lord of the Flies or a similar narrative, we’re narrowing what can happen.
Watching children interact with one another, especially in a place of play, is a way to consider how our future will exist. What have we taught our children to value? I’m not worried about them. I’m worried about us. What have we inspired?
You have two children. Have you watched them interact with your work?
They participate in my projects, and because we travel so much, we home-school them: it’s a practical way to keep our family together. All these explorations are reference points for our conversations. I’m concerned about the impact of our gaze on their development, because their generation’s emotional intelligence is far beyond mine. Developing this work is for them.
Several PST Art exhibitions relate to the concept of Indigenous Futurism. How do you feel about that term?
I struggle with it. It’s a fine way to describe my interests, but it’s just keywords for search.What fascinates me is how different cultures interpret time.
“Futurism” limits us to a linear concept of time. But Indigenous time is not linear. It’s a fourth-dimensional space without beginning, middle or end. The things we make are not simply objects but also time machines. Ways of making become embedded in art objects, which then move through time.
This may be why we struggle to develop time travel as it’s conceived in science fiction. We’ve already made these machines. Knowledge is entangled in the objects we house in museums, collections and archives. They are frozen moments that will inform future generations about past knowledge and technology.
PST Art: Art & Science Collide opens in September 2024. Read all our preview coverage here