Cannupa Hanska Luger
October 3, 2024
We sat down with Cannupa Hanska Luger to traverse the space-time continuum, learn about the biological result of increased oxygen in the atmosphere, and hear how he’s putting his extensive blanket collection to use. Luger is one of 18 extraordinary artists selected for The Triennial 2025, opening next May with public art installations across Boston. Learn more about The Triennial 2025 and its theme of The Exchange, developed by Artistic Director Pedro Alonzo and Curator Tess Lukey here.
I’d like to open with your piece Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta in the Whitney Biennial. It’s part of your Future Ancestral Technologies series and addresses the idea that one belongs to a place more so than a place belongs to an individual. Can you talk about how belonging shows up in your work?
The Future Ancestral Technology projects have a pretty broad scope. The notion of belonging to a place more than a place belongs to you, I think, is an Indigenous technology—maybe a human technology—that hasn't been allowed to move through society at the pace at which colonization and notions of permanent borders have.
Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta, literally, “Fat Takers World Is Upside Down”, was developed to reframe this notion of belonging. Does it belong to me? Do I belong to it? We can do paperwork, sign deeds, use all of these human documents, and enforce property laws and values upon one another, but we all die, and at best, we become compost for the land. Being a part of the world is an invitation and an opportunity to liberate ourselves from our ridiculous human constructs.
You literally turn the idea of belonging on its head in this piece.
It's challenging, right? The United States is a nation built on displacement, and I think that displacement inflicts trauma on everybody in proximity to those suffering. And that trauma perpetuates itself across society.
I would love to see liberation from the trauma of displacement. The challenge is encouraging positions of power to recognize that they are in a trauma state. All that privilege and greed does not satiate the sense of belonging.
Absolutely. Another piece in the Future Ancestral Technologies series, Sovereign, in Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice at the Hammer in L.A., confronts the idea that the cosmos is the next frontier, which, I think, is a part of colonial myth-making.
Space exploration and the amount of capital that goes into space exploration is the most fantastical iteration of neocolonialism. It uses language that's so similar to westward expansion: “exploring new frontiers.” .
I'm a sci-fi fan, but the first iterations of science fiction in Hollywood were part and parcel of the Western genre. Indians were traded for aliens, cowboys for astronauts. This notion of the outsider bringing some sort of salvation to folks leads to paradigm collisions where the non-astronaut, non-cowboy paradigm is deemed evil in some sense. I wanted to play with some of these tropes.
Breath(e) is part of Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide. Are the spacesuits wearable at all?
They're not wearable. They are sculptural in their form. The technology that I'm trying to share when I make these art pieces is, more often than not, a representation of more-than-human kinships.
Regalia is built around a commitment to another species which you emulate as a show of reverence. We've traded reverence for the secular in many ways, but people still love, demand, and maintain this act of transformation. It has cultural context, but when you have severed your ties to a place, you've also severed your ties to what those kinships are beyond place.
Making these eight-foot figures wasn't about them being monumental. Oftentimes, Indigenous people want to know where the science is because we can't use cosmology and myth-making as a form of science. I love hard science. There was a period in our history when we had megafauna and megaflora. Increased oxygen content in the atmosphere made that possible. If the figures in Sovereign are time travelers—if they're moving through a space-time continuum and navigating that rift between past, present, and future—what could this look like? Can I imagine a future in which our air is saturated with oxygen? And if it is saturated with oxygen, what happens to a biological entity? Its scale increases. It can grow larger muscles and move larger frames. They need to wear a breathing apparatus to come back here to talk to us because we don't recognize it, but we have depleted our air.
Speaking of ecological disasters, you have a piece curated by Public Art Fund in New York right now, Attrition, that references the mass slaughter of North American bison, a strategic move by settlers that forced Great Plains Native American populations to assimilate into Western culture and caused major ecological harm. From what I understand, your commission for the Boston Public Art Triennial in 2025 will address similar themes.
We built Attrition in a way that could survive the impact of a population. Early in the process, I wanted to make it out of clay, but Public Art Fund was afraid that visitors would break it. We pivoted and ended up using steel, but it did make me think about how the way people interact with an object in space may reinforce the very narratives and questions that I'm trying to communicate. Are you more concerned about bison sculptures than you were about bison? Does the object somehow have way more value as an object than it did as a living, breathing entity?
The bison exists as a symbol of this wild America, but the animal itself did not have any sort of agency in the American expansion conversation. The U.S. actually gathered the bones after slaughtering these bison and shipped them back east to burn them and turn them into calcium carbonate and bone black. Calcium carbonate was used as fertilizer as well as in early steel production. Bone black was used as a pigment in everything from industrial paint to cosmetics. They were also used to filter sugar in the lands we were annexing and forcing people to work on.
So much buffalo has moved through our system. Calcium carbonate is a slow-releasing fertilizer. All across the Midwest, all of that feed for pigs and cows, all of that wheat and soy for our bread and gross national products—it’s buffalo. Why don't we understand that better? Why don't we celebrate that better, and why don't we acknowledge their annihilation as collateral damage to the prosperity of this country?
I've been taking these iterative, small steps as a person who has a kinship to bison. I'm Buffalo People. The only reason I'm here is because we made a pact a long time ago, and in that pact, it was declared that we are responsible for them. I have survivor's guilt with bison. I often ask myself how I can utilize my privilege to amplify and speak about what bison have contributed to the United States.
For the Boston Public Art Triennial, I'm encouraging people to reconnect these resources with their origin in the bison. Does participation change the way the public relates to the bison and their loss? Can we have a sense of ownership without possession?
We're not just entangled in our present. We are entangled in our histories. Acknowledging that is phase one of restoring our relationship with place. It goes back to belonging. If we can recognize how we've benefited from violence, maybe we’ll internalize it in a way that gives us the opportunity to ask for forgiveness.
Yeah, forgiveness is complex because I think the U.S. has a long history of expecting prosperity to cover its multitude of sins. Acknowledging the past is only one step toward asking for forgiveness. On the subject of accumulating historical records, I heard that you're something of an archivist yourself and have an extensive quilt collection. Is that true?
Not quilts. I collect afghans. I wouldn't say I'm an archivist. I cannibalize those pieces, transform them, and use them the same way we would have customarily used hides. This is Americana, you know. You took away our buffalo, now I'm taking away your auntie’s blanket or your baby's blanket, and I'm going to use it in the place where we would have customarily used hides.
I transform those knitted blankets into regalia as a way to acknowledge and celebrate them. They have to be made by hand; we haven't developed a machine that can crochet. They're a part of a gift economy. Their primary exchange is care, not money.
I see the medicine in these crafts. My grandmother was a quilter, and she was sharp as a pin her whole life because she quilted. For regalia, for making this bond between humans and more than human kinships, it's important that the materials I use are love, empathy, care, and gift.
Is there any reason that you chose to collect afghans in particular, or did that happen organically?
It was organic. It was practical. I'm a sculptor, and that means that I have to transport objects across distances and vehicles. Early in my career, before I could afford art handlers, I would buy packing blankets and transport my own work. I quickly realized that an afghan was cheaper than a packing blanket.
I started collecting them to transport sculptures, but if you're in the business of moving sculptures around, you end up having a lot of packing blankets, which meant I ended up having a lot of afghans. Once more and more afghans started to fill my studio, I just started liking it. I don't have any kind of background with them other than just seeing them and thinking of them as Americana, but now I love a chevron, I love a granny square. My favorite kind of afghans are the afghans that are put together from the tail ends of somebody's yarn collection, you ain't making color choices, you’re just emptying out your bin so you can get some more colors, right? You get the weirdest combinations.
My partner is making a blanket like that right now.
Exactly. I like those. I think there's something really incredible in the randomness. It's like a celebration of all of the things you made intentionally. The granny square is a perfect model for that, where you're like, “All right, I only got about twelve feet of friggin fluorescent pink, what am I gonna do with it?”
I love that. I know you had a busy September. Are there any exhibitions that stood out for you in particular?
I don't know if it's imposter syndrome, but I generally don't feel comfortable in museums. I’m a maker. When I look at art, I'm not diving into the ecstatic experience the artist had in creating the work. I want to know: how was that made? But I have a lot of peers who are in Breath(e) and it's phenomenal. Lan Tuazon, Mel Chin, Ron Finley, Garnett Puett. Garnett makes sculptures with bees. He allows a hive to build on top of a sculpture.