Cannupa Hanska Luger: Sé’sh Shóto’sh Psí’sh

Sé’sh Shóto’sh Psí’sh (Red, Black, White) presents new and recent regalia and video work from Luger’s speculative fiction series, Future Ancestral Technologies. This ongoing project looks to customary practices in order to move culture forward. It actively incorporates science fiction theory, storytelling, Indigenous technologies, contemporary materials and the detritus of capitalism to present time-bending landscapes and to prototype new myths.

Science fiction has the power to shape collective thinking and serves as a vehicle to imagine the future on a global scale. Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is Indigenous science fiction. It is a methodology, a practice, a way of future dreaming, rooted in a continuum.

Through installation, video and land-based work, the series develops an ongoing narrative in which Indigenous people develop sustainable, migration-based technology to live nomadically in hyper-attunement to land and water. The project also prototypes designs for objects and their use and advances new materials and new modes of thinking within Indigenous methodologies. Moving sci-fi theory into practice, Future Ancestral Technologies conjures innovative life-based solutions for a highly adaptable lifestyle to live with the land, not off the land.

Presented in the exhibition Sé’sh Shóto’sh Psí’sh are two entry points into the world-building work of Future Ancestral Technologies. Muscle, Bone & Sinew embody the celebration of food, shelter, and tools—paying attention to gratitude for sustenance and reverence for the technology of more than human kinships—this work is a symbol of abundance. While Watȟéča looks at utilizing the detritus our time, making due with what is left, and meant to evoke and embody the blessings and lessons of the scavenger. These two ideas make up a spectrum of possibilities to tell a full narrative of complexity in the act of survival.

“Building worlds and dismantling misconceptions through monumental installations, sculpture and performance, I place myself between the realms of contemporary art and Indigenous culture, moving amidst museums and the front lines to enact a more complex understanding of contemporary Indigeneity. ”

–Cannupa Hanska Luger

Sé’sh Shóto’sh Psí’sh is presented as part of the MAH’s Kincentricity project, a three-year initiative launched in collaboration with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, that explores Indigenous culture. Funding is provided through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Museums for America program. Additional support provided by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Header Image: Muscle, Bone & Sinew. Cannupa Hanska Luger. Film Still. Cinematogrpaher Lucas Mullikan, 2021.