FUTURE ANCESTRAL TECHNOLOGIES: WE SURVIVE YOU

(2020)

The SITE-commissioned installation is a rendition of Native artist Cannupa Hanska Luger’s ongoing science- fiction- based project, Future Ancestral Technologies. The installation includes a 3-channel video, a full-sized modified Volkswagen van, and a disassembled teepee. These are the modes of transport and of nomadic existence belonging to an imagined future family. They inhabit a world where the concept of the refugee has long disappeared from the human lexicon. There are no refugees in this future, because the colonizing forces that contributed to the global crisis, with the Byzantine formation of the world’s political and geographic boundaries, no longer exist. The installation posits an embrace of an Indigenous way of life in the wake of a global catastrophe and represents a merging of ancestral and future technologies: telescoping and packable teepee poles, for instance. Embedded in the genetic coding of future populations is a memory of how to live in balance with the land. “This piece proposes that displacement, with climate change and all the rest of it, is everyone’s future,” Hofmann says. “And perhaps the way to move forward is with an indigenous worldview.” — M.A.

Left, Candice Breitz, Love Story (2016), 7- channel video installation; courtesy the artist, photo Brandon Soder

Opposite page, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Future Ancestral Technologies: We Survive You, (installation view, detail, 2019), 3- channel video with mixed media; courtesy the artist, photo Brandon Soder