Shadow holding shape to experience the energy of the sun. Single Channel Video Featuring Muscle, Bone & Sinew regalia. Cannupa Hanska Luger, 2021

By combining features of science fiction with Indigenous receptivity, Cannupa Hanska Luger creates a new genre that includes monstrous forms that defy a monstrous characterization, a feature similar to Harlan Ellison’s characters. “I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream,” like most speculative fiction, frames humans as protagonists. Luger’s works seem to treat humanity as supporting characters among a whole cast of creatures and elements. Arguably, they appear to dispel the trope of monster as villain, looking instead toward a more holistic future where the distinction between human and nonhuman is blurred. 

Muscle, Bone, and Sinew are monsters of renewal representative of what the artist describes as “future dreaming, rooted in a continuum,” emphasizing that we cannot understand the meaning of the work as mere objects, in a way that reflects how land acknowledgements as they are employed by institutions today cannot fully encompass the multivalence of the land itself, which transcends objectification, or single moments. Intentionally or unintentionally, Muscle, Bone, and Sinew defies what scholar Elizabeth Freeman calls chrononormativity, or the use of time to standardize human activity and the “visceral pull of the past on the supposedly revolutionary present.” The past and present of Muscle, Bone, and Sinew only define their future because of our limitations in how we understand time. Their crocheted bodies are armored with hockey gloves and shin guards, making them fiercely competitive, and their sneakers keep them fast and agile. Their oversized, faceless heads are connected with wool and felt collars or manes. Their enormous horns may call to bison, but these hybrid forms could be here to serve the land and support the regeneration and the healing of the earth. Muscle, Bone, and Sinew are what Luger calls a “future ancestral technology.” They transcend a man-monster dichotomy, using human craft and technology restoratively instead of destructively. Muscle, Bone, and Sinew can be viewed as reducing the deprivation of the land and in service of regenerating growth in an environment decimated by the destructive efforts to maintain balance.

Muscle, Bone, and Sinew are subject in a video, Shadow Holding Shape To Experience The Energy Of The Sun. In it, the beings scan the landscape as though they have just arrived at their destination before becoming one through their shadows in an abandoned water tank. In a jarring robotic voice, the narrator makes a series of proclamations that expose a past and present of exploiting the earth and human identity, imagining an action-based future in which AI, which “can survive toxic places ruined by our ancestors,” may actually be guided by the lessons of balance within the earth, rather than exploitation. The voice informs the viewer that the etymology of “monster” is Latin—monstrum or monster drawn from monere, “to warn.” As these future ancestors, given shape as therianthropic creatures, warn, “AI will develop for its own survival.” But it is possible that they could also give agency back to us in the present by positing, “what if it could learn from a civilization that lives with the environment rather than capitalizing on it?” This glimpse into a potential future can help us address the most pressing issues of today.

- From And I Must Scream exhibition catalog essay written by Amanda H. Hellman, Ph.D., Curator of African Art at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, Atlanta, GA