DISCOVERING THE NORTH AMERICAN AFTERCULTURE

AN INSTALLATION;
AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE FUTURE

 

The DISCOVERING THE NORTH AMERICAN AFTERCULTURE is a glimpse of a future being shaped, and even lived, right now.
It imagines the culture that might emerge if we fully embraced a completly sustainable, sacred world-outlook. A diorama, crafted artifacts, paintings and photomurals show a NEW NATIVE AMERICAN people whose life-patterns are healing to a damaged land. They look like us: a mixture of races and backgrounds, and there are hints that much of the knowledge gathered in our time remains alive in oral tradition. But they are also profoundly unlike us. They know themselves as part of the web of life. Seeing the natural world as an expression of the sacred, they have simplified their lives the better to move in balance with it.
This is a glimpse of "a future that works:" sustainable, simple, sacred--and anthropologically defensible.
But it's not the only possible way we could live: the Afterculture signals a return to the rich "cultural biodiversity" that has characterized the human species for most of its sojourn here, and the viewer is challenged to imagine other versions, other tribes.

A TRAVELING EXHIBIT
In the time of the Afterculture, our powerful need to dominate has finally relented, and the homogenous, one-size-fits-all "monoculture" is a matter of myth and legend. People have returned to the rhythms of region and "spirit of place." It might be said that the folk of North America are finally becoming Native Americans. DISCOVERING THE NORTH AMERICAN AFTERCULTURE will be a traveling site-specific exhibit, collaborating with local craftsmen, storytellers and gardeners to imaginatively build a future that reflects the environmental, cultural, and mythic dimensions of their region. Examination of local native Indian cultures will be an important point of departure.

The Afterculture exhibit is being created as part of the Smithsonian Institution’s visiting artist’s program, and is scheduled, as of 11/26/00, to open Spring 2002.at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.

DRUMS &
DIGERIDOOS