Sé’sh Shóto’sh Psí’sh (Muscle, Bone & Sinew)

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 Sé’sh Shóto’sh Psí’sh, from the artist's Future Ancestral Technologies series, is Indigenous science fiction. It is a methodology, a practice, a way of future dreaming, rooted in a continuum.

Future Ancestral Technologies is an approach to making art objects, video, and land based performance with the intent to influence global consciousness. This Indigenous-centered science fiction uses creative storytelling to radically reimagine the future. Moving sci-fi theory into practice, this methodology conjures innovative life-based solutions that promote a thriving Indigeneity.

This Indigenous science fiction is characterized by regalia, tools, shelter, transportation, and technology which invite the viewer to experience multiple points of entry into Luger’s sci-fi narrative and myth telling through multiple symbiotic landscapes. The ongoing narrative developed by installation and land based work articulates future spaces in which Indigenous people harness technology to live nomadically, reclaiming hyper-attunement to land and water. Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is a story, a methodology, a practice, a way of futurism, that suggests alternative approaches to recognizing the future with reverence.

Using art practice to adopt science fiction, Future Ancestral Technologies is a context for dismantling time to imagine the distant future and dream of sustainable approaches to the lived experiences of the generations to come. Using traditional craft and the act of making creates futuristic potential, the process imagines, enacts and prototypes experiences and technologies that promote Indigenous cultures to thrive into the future.

Future Ancestral Technologies challenges and empowers humans—from individuals to industries—to visualize an Indigenous future and to practice empathy and resourcefulness in epochs to come.

“Future Ancestral Technologies looks to customs in order to move us forward, advancing new materials and new modes of thinking by utilizing science fiction theory, creative storytelling, Indigenous technology and contemporary materials and the detritus of capitalism to present time bending landscapes of myth. ”
–Cannupa Hanska Luger

Header Image: Future Ancestral Technologies ++ a generation of new myth ++ 3 channel video installation, featuring monster slayer regalia, mirí aráda + awá ahbáaxi. (image still) Cannupa Hanska Luger 2021. Photo by Gabe Fermin.