SURVIVA: Future Ancestral Technologies
Future Ancestral Technologies
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Ayin Press
Publishing:16th Oct '25
£26.99
This title is due to be published on 16th October, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

An ambitious, world-envisioning work of Indigenous futurism.
Since 2015—through a proliferation of forms including sculpture, regalia, film, photography, poetry, painting, and installation—acclaimed multimedia artist Cannupa Hanska Luger has been weaving together strands of a new myth. Collectively referred to as Future Ancestral Technologies, this sprawling series of interrelated works seeks to reimagine Indigenous life and culture in a postcolonial world where space exploration has reduced and reconfigured the earth’s population.
Part graphic novel, part art book, SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide offers readers a view beneath, beyond, and between the lines of Luger's ever-expanding artistic universe. In this ecstatically hybrid work, Luger transforms a 1970s military survival guide through poetic redaction, speculative fiction, and iterative line drawing—deftly surfacing and disrupting the colonial subconscious that haunts this vexed source text. An epic and timely meditation on planetary life in the midst of transformation, SURVIVA boldly presents an earth-based, demilitarized futuredream that foregrounds Indigenous knowledge as critical to humanity’s survival.
SURVIVA is the first title from Aora Books, a publishing imprint dedicated to exploring transformational thought and culture that transcends borders, disciplines, and traditions. Rooted in an ethos of polyvocality and planetary consciousness, Aora publishes works that forge bold connections across time, place, ideas, and beings often seen as separate.
"Cannupa Hanska Luger has created a wondrous book of survivance, a story to carry in pocket and study at every opportunity. At once a dystopia (earth is near destroyed) and a postcolonial fantasy (the colonizers abandon the planet for good), SURVIVA is a work of artistic brilliance that draws our attention to the simultaneity of ruins and futures. Rich with dreampower and evocation, these pages illustrate the mysteries of space-time, the dissolution of boundaries, and the relational universe described by Indigenous quantum mechanics. Read carefully, SURVIVA has the power to bend time itself, lifting us from past and present into futures innumerable."
—Philip J. Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University and author of Playing Indian
"SURVIVA offers Indigenous wisdom for a shared future built on ancestral knowledge in radical relation. This is a survival guide like none other."
—Candice Hopkins, curator of the Forge Project
"SURVIVA is not just another riff on a sci-fi depiction of some imagined future. Luger’s poetic and visual interventions are clear directives for all of us to ready our minds, bodies, and spirits as we continue to move through the future together."
—Jeffrey Gibson, artist and editor of An Indigenous Present
"SURVIVA boldly reimagines our conceptions of time and history, challenging our collective narratives and pushing us to rethink the art of survival through a lens of transformation."
—Hank Willis Thomas, artist and cofounder of For Freedoms
"Cannupa Hanska Luger is a mad genius able to weave parables from tomorrow with lessons from yesterday into a stunningly prescient and wise field guide you should read right now. This is not a book. This is a time machine."
—Jordan Klepper, The Daily Show, Comedy Central
"SURVIVA feels everlasting and also like it will self-destruct after you read it."
—Sterlin Harjo, filmmaker, Reservation Dogs (Hulu/FX)
- Winner of 2018 Burke Prize Winner, Museum of Arts and Design 2018
- Winner of 2023 SOROS Arts Fellowship Award 2023
- Winner of 2020 A Blade Of Grass Fellow for Socially Engaged 2020
- Winner of 2021 Grist 50 Changemaker Fellow 2021
- Winner of 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship Award 2022
ISBN: 9781961814264
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
100 pages