SURVIVA is a durational performance work in which I embody a character from my art and poetry book of the same name. Rooted in the ethos of Future Ancestral Technologies, this performance brings to life a being shaped by adaptation, memory, and survival—drawn from the remnants of a redacted 1970s survival guide and projected into a speculative, demilitarized future.

This performance will unfold on the land, as a live offering—a gesture of reverence and repair. It may be live streamed or documented as an echo, but its primary purpose is to exist in real time and place, in direct relationship with the environment, witnessed first by the land itself.

Conceptual Framework

SURVIVA emerges from Future Ancestral Technologies, an ongoing series of interdisciplinary works that reimagine Indigenous existence beyond colonial timelines, in a world transformed by space migration, ecological collapse, and cultural resurgence. The character I embody is an amalgam of ancestral knowledge and speculative imagination—a future ancestor navigating the ruins and possibilities of survival.

Drawing from a redacted survival manual—once meant to train individuals to endure wilderness as an adversary—this work reclaims survival as Indigenous technology. In this performance, survival becomes a creative, relational, poetic and even spiritual act that reconnects body and land, memory and futurity.

Form and Structure

The performance will take place outdoors, on a site chosen for its resonance with themes of displacement, continuity, and transformation. Over several hours or days, I will move through a series of actions derived from the survival guide’s remaining fragments: gathering, resting, sheltering, listening, transmitting. These are not re-enactments, but adaptations—gestures of care and communion, performed not for spectacle but for connection.

The work may be live streamed or recorded, not as the primary expression but as a trace or echo—a digital afterimage for distant audiences to witness. In this way, the documentation becomes its own artifact, a portal into an action that was first and foremost offered to the land.

Intent and Impact

SURVIVA challenges dominant narratives around survival, futurity, and performance. It invites us to consider what it means to enact presence rather than spectacle; to be in ceremony with place, rather than performing for it. This is a practice of Indigenous worldbuilding—a re-engagement with ritual, responsibility, and embodied knowledge.

Through reverent, site-based action, SURVIVA honors ancestral wisdom as a map for future possibilities. It is not about imagining the future; it is about enacting it—now. In this way, the work offers a quiet but insistent invitation: to listen, to witness, to repair. To be in right relation with the land and each other.