Making as Future Survival A Dialogue with Cannupa Hanska Luger

Lucy CotterThe core focus of your current work is future survival and twenty-first-century Indigeneity. You work in so many ways – sculpturally, through performance and video, and with socially engaged and curatorial projects – but it seems to me to all revolve around making. Is that what drives you as an artist?

Cannupa Hanska LugerYes, I’m more about materials and process than I am about concepts. My approach is, “The concept will show up. What am I working with here?”

LCSometimes you’ve described yourself as a craftsperson and there’s a sense that we can take things into our own hands and make a future – we can make in ways that bring the past into the present and the future. There is so much political agency in what making can or could make happen in your practice.

CHL Yes, totally. I think it’s funny that to be able to make something with your hands and create a thing somehow puts you in the position of being political. That makes sense because we’ve submitted our wealth, our collective knowledge of creation and making to the economic wheels that spin. We’ve removed all notions of manufacturing within society. Our economy is built on trading stuff, but we’re not making any of the things for trade. You’re just connecting one person to another to get a thing, sell a thing, and in that process you lose a lot of agency.

I like making stuff, whatever it is – making dinner, making dishes I would eat off. I like learning new skill sets. I’m a jack-of-all-trades, master of none, although I’m getting pretty close in clay. I’ve definitely put in my 10,000 hours in some random things, but there’s constant knowledge to be gained. What I know is finite, what I don’t know is infinite. I should look at the infinite, start from that place, and I think making, for me, is a way to take in information. It’s a way to take in knowledge, take in recipes, and give meaning to definitions, materials, and other things.

Interacting with material, pushing it to its edge, allowing it to push me to my edge, there’s a whole reciprocal experience that happens between me and things that are deemed inanimate, and I think their influence is proof of their animism. They’re literally pushing and bending the way that I’m living my life. They’re a participant in life being lived: How is that not the same? I think when you interact with materials, you begin to better understand that connectedness versus calling up Jeff Bezos and saying, “Send me a thing.”

LCOne of your current major projects, Future Ancestral Technologies, delves into the relationship between making and knowledge in the past and the future. It is based around Indigenous futurism, and you also draw on speculative fiction and science fiction. Can we talk about the video work We Live, in which two figures can be seen walking across a landscape? We hear in the narrative voiceover that the colonizers have left, and those who have been left behind are the Indigenous people and those who have worked the land, and together they’re going to create some kind of new cultures.

These people are wearing full regalia, with aesthetic aspects that invoke traditional Indigenous regalia, but they also incorporate futuristic, sports equipment-based elements. It seems like this storyline of imagining forward is a departure point for each of the various aspects of the Future Ancestral Technologies project. I’m interested to hear you speak about this coming together of past, present, and future, as well as the role of fiction.

CHL Yes, that’s me just reading the room. “Okay, what’s going on presently? If I’m going to imagine a future place, what’s happening now?” Some of the wealthiest folks in the world are looking at space exploration. They’re saying, “All right, we can go where there isn’t going to be an Indigenous problem.” There’s a notion of colonies, this notion of space exploration. I’m thinking, “I’ve seen it before. I promise you; you’re going to call it the New World. You’re not that creative. I’ve seen this happen.”

I’m also thinking, “How many things do I have to purchase to give you the capital to go? You should totally go. I’m for it. It’s going to be amazing. You should go and check out space. That’d be great.”

LCAnd the rest of us should stay here. (Laughs)

CHL I’m totally staying, and they’re not going to make enough seats for all of us anyway. I know how this operates, and they’re going to take every resource they can from the perfect ship we live on right now to fulfill this dream of exodus. I’m saying, “You should go, take it, take what you need. I promise you we’ll survive it.” We’ll survive after this toxic perpetuation of dominion and control has left the planet. I’m thinking, “You should totally go, we’ll come up with something better.”

I don’t want to focus on it being an antithesis to those systems either, because I feel like the inevitable failure of those systems is nigh. We’re seeing it crumbling right now, and there are some last-ditch efforts, like space exploration. It looks like, as Tesla and [Elon Musk’s] thinkers are saying, a multi-planet species. I’m like, “Dude, the moment you spend six months out there, a year, four years, you’re going to begin to resent the neglect of planet Earth.” I’m like, “It’s hard, space is hard, but you should totally do it.” This pioneer intrepid spirit.

I’m thinking, “You know what you can actually do in space? You can lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.” In outer space, in zero G, is the only place in the universe where you can lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. That’s the myth of America. I’m like, “Nobody’s ever done that, we’re all super-reliant on one another. We’re interconnected, we’re interdependent, but you should go to space.”

Where I’m interested in starting that conversation is beyond the exodus. What happens to those who remain and how do we develop and reinforce technology? Presently, we focus on technology being mechanisms, and it’s not. Technology is ideas. A lot of Indigenous technology exists in our cosmology, in our homes, in symbols we create, in forms we express through dance and music. But that technology has not been allowed to navigate through material science and mechanisms.

LCCan we talk about how you enable these ideas to be recognizable as technologies? The word “technology” comes from techne, which has to do with making, a link that is foregrounded in many areas of your practice. In your We Survive You and Tipi projects you repurpose the detritus of industrial culture and future-proof and reintegrate Indigenous elements. While imagining a nomadic post-industrial way of life, we see the tipi becoming something that echoes high-tech mountaineering trek equipment.

One of your recent film projects, Continuum, shows your family kitted out in gear that is made by you, partly from repurposed packing blankets. I love the fact that rather than being dystopic or utopian, there is this very practical sense that we’re going to work with everything we have, which is a mixture of this detritus and the constancy of the natural world, and the knowledge that lies in both.

CHL Totally, but I’m more inclined to talk about our customary practices than our traditions. Tradition feels like an imposition of ideas that makes it stagnate, makes it stick to a certain moment in time. Customarily, we would adapt to new material immediately. That adaptation is how we survive to this present moment. As a human species, we’re one of the most adaptable creatures on the planet. We’re everywhere. Even in places that would be hostile to us, we find a way to explore those regions. The exploration is in the question, can we live here? What would we have to do to live here?

The thing that I like about the tipi as a methodology, or a technology is that it is embedded in the nomadic existence, and it doesn’t have to be much more high-tech than it is already. The high-tech aspect of it is a shift in mental perspective. The home I live in, the studio that I’m working in, the plot of land that I own is a technology that I was forced to assimilate into; this notion that these are mine now. This isn’t my stuff. I’m borrowing this. I’m only here for so long. I think the tipi reinforces this notion of transience and movement, and, really, freedom in the core sense of the word, where I have more choices.

The more stuff I have, the fewer choices, so a tipi opens that up. Look at this entire generation of people interested in blowing off their parental modalities and saying, “I’m going to live in a van for a while and travel around. I’m going to see things and enjoy my life.” That’s not new, that’s really old. It’s probably truer to our nature than the systems that we’re forced to navigate, which are ultimately traps to make us still, to settle us.

LCSome of your other works foreground these...