Cannupa Hanska Luger featured in Artnet

Luger created this work for the second edition of Novo Collective‘s experimental public art program Uncommissioned, which brought six new public artworks to Curaçao. These include stained glass by local artist and organizer Avantia Damberg, plus a performance, an environmentally integrated sculpture, and another such desert installation by her cohorts Nash Caldera, Giovanni Abath, and Ailsa Anastatia, respectively.

Luger’s practice encompasses multiple modalities, too. His latest endeavor, however, may be his wildest, most fast-paced yet, turning social practice into sculpture within the span of a week. His family, of course, helped make it happen—a throughline within his work. “We did a project last year for Desert X, where we transformed our family van into a fog drip system to gather moisture out of the air,” Luger told me on the remote, uninhabited island of Klein Curaçao, where he, along with his family, Damberg and I, had arrived to install Damberg’s final work for Uncommissioned. Luger’s latest endeavor, however, eschews extraction—employing whistles, instead, as a symbol for generosity.

Here, Luger recounts how he made it happen.

My work is place-based. I consider the land my primary audience. I had done workshops before making whistles, so we started with that idea as an opportunity to meet people from Curaçao and hear from them—not necessarily around the whistle or around the project, but just around being people around a table doing something. I’ve found that when people build with their hands, all the defense mechanisms fall off.

The first time we met Jerry [Guo] and Chuman [Zhang, founders of Novo Collective], they picked us up in a dinghy right on the beach by our accommodation, and we boated over to a floating dock, in mangroves. The landscape here was so bizarre to me. I’ve been to a couple of islands in the Caribbean, and they have been incredibly tropical. The density of the thorny trees and cacti and mangroves, all in the same location—just trying to get a sense of that was fascinating. The very next morning, we visited with an archaeologist. She came with us to some sites that have cave paintings, pictographs, a bit further up from the Kueba di Indjan.

She also provided a soil map of Curaçao. When we went and visited the cave painting sites, we harvested clay. All of the clay that we harvested was full of salt, so we didn’t use it in any of the workshops. That was store-bought. For the installation, though, I ended up using some of the clay that we processed.

One of the workshops we had was at Farm to Crafts. They have a machine there that processes banana stalks from the island. Using those in the work was a way to reuse materials—sometimes the farmers will use it for fertilizer, but the amount of material produced would overwhelm any compost. That’s what was available, so that’s what we used. Waste materials are always an interesting material for me to work with. I like things that are part of a secondary industry, a byproduct.

I was expecting to get cordage, but it was literally just fibers. My wife Ginger [Dunnill] grew up making Ti Leaf Leis. She’s from Maui, and she was like, “I’ll just twist them up. It’s no problem.” The net, the suspension, all of that stuff was not part of the original plan. We were just responding to the materials we had, the landscape we were in, the environment. There was no time to second guess.

I’ve been building flutes for 15 years now, off and on. Doing a workshop with folks, it’s nice to have some sort of reward. The reward of transforming a small handful of clay into a whistle, there’s a dopamine rush. Something happens in that form and its simplicity that excites any maker at any age, at any ability level.

It took me years to make something I was really proud of. But through my experience, I found this simple whistle. It’s not about aesthetics, it’s about function. Once we got here, I was surprised to learn of the gogorobi, which is a similar-looking instrument made from the calabash fruit. It was really cool to hear the shape that I was making in clay predated my being here, predated the Dutch being here.

There are so many things in the world that take more than they give. Creating a little tiny clay whistle and making sound that can fill an entire space feels like the opposite.

While I was learning, Ginger and the boys would go record things. When we would do workshops, we brought the recorders and asked people to play the whistles all at the same time. It was just always having the recorder there to gather sounds because we knew we wanted to build a sound bank for my son to compose with. The first day that I went down to the site to install, he built one composition. We recorded that and then played it on a Bluetooth speaker. And then the day of the reception, he composed a new one. The two played across the cavern. But all of it was literally just making in the moment—if something turns out exactly like I plan it, I feel like I’ve failed somehow.

I had this red clay slip that I was going to decorate the pieces with, but I started to think about the history of that red iron painting on the caves. I started to question, ‘who am I to do that here?’ I don’t know what these symbols mean. I don’t know what their purpose is. Instead, I used the slip to inform the gravity of the stalactite and the stalagmite, to stain the banana leaf and bind the clay vessels together. All of those whistles that people had made, no matter where they came from, whether they knew each other or not, they’re a part of this place. Pouring the slip over those vessels was a way to acknowledge and recognize that the land binds us.