Future Ancestral Technologies: Roaming
2023
Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger
Curator Risa Puleo
Address
2701 Cherokee St
St. Louis, MO
Site Description
The Luminary + Augmented Reality.
Artwork Details
About the Artwork
As they were in the past, buffalo are integral to an Indigenous future world. In Future Ancestral Technologies: Roaming, created by Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota) in collaboration with Fabricatorz Foundation, viewers are invited to watch buffalo roam through virtual space via their mobile phones. In the augmented reality platform, viewers can interact with seven Midéegaadi (buffalo in the Hidatsa language) positioned along the St. Louis’s horizon line.
In a continuous looping performative action, the Midéegaadi invite the buffalo to return to St. Louis. Over the course of the exhibition, this invitation became increasingly accessible from locales beyond St. Louis as its movement through digital space amplified its call. This initiated a series of additional returns including the prairies on which the buffalo feed and undammed Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to provide water for those plants and animals.
On the exterior of The Luminary, an image of the Midéegaadi was overlaid with text that read “We Survive You.” Luger uses the vagueness of the pronoun “we” to engage viewers in a conversation and ask: Who are “we” relative to survival?
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About Midéegaadi
In the 1800s, non-Native settlers and military forces undertook the intentional slaughter of bison herds, driving the species to near extinction. This deliberate act was aimed towards destroying economies, food sources, and lifeways of many Indigenous peoples of North America.
The figures of Midéegaadi draw attention to how the loss of a single species has lasting impacts on communities and the environment over 200 years later, while maintaining a pledge of accountability to the land and waters that have sustained the Buffalo Nation and in turn the human beings.
By celebrating the ancestral technology of calling bison back onto the landscape and using augmented reality, Counter Public artist Cannupa Hanska Luger invites us to visualize the bison’s regeneration and repair.
Midéegaadi does more than celebrate an animal; it acknowledges atrocity and reveals complexity; it reckons with the accumulation of time and the potentialities of the future.
“For people Indigenous to North America, the buffalo are an emblem of survival and cultural adaptation; we respect the buffalo as a relative. This work mourns the loss of a mighty species and the violence that has built our country while celebrating the bison’s resilience and in turn our own. Midéegaadi empowers Indigenous people and practices as central to global futures and reflects a future space where we once again live in reverence and respect for our more than human kinships.” –Cannupa Hanska Luger
Midéegaadi are a part of the newest series from Cannupa Hanska Luger’s speculative fiction series, Future Ancestral Technologies, a project that 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.