She Falls for Ages, 2017
Digital video (color, sound) displayed on monitor
Running time: 21 minutes, 2 seconds, looped
Courtesy of the artist
“In She Falls for Ages, I didn’t recreate something that already happened; I got to make a world that I wanted to live in. So I have a pink sky, because pink is my favorite color. And the people have different color faces that are random and not related to the color of their parents, because I really wanted to see what a post-race society could look like.”
—Skawennati
At the beginning of She Falls for Ages, we meet a young mother and her twin children with magical powers who live in a futuristic world. The narrative that unfolds is a retelling of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) creation story as a short science fiction movie, in which Sky Woman is imagined as an astronaut who falls through space.
Skawennati (she/her/hers) made this machinima (machine + cinema) by recording the avatars and environments she created in the virtual world Second Life. One of the first net artists, she founded CyberPowWow and co-founded Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), both online platforms that center Indigenous artists and cultures. For Skawennati, digital technologies are important because they allow Indigenous people to document their experiences, share their stories, and build their communities. In She Falls for Ages, the possibilities of digital moviemaking and the tropes of science fiction allow us to imagine a world in which, for example, the technologies of Indigenous people are valued, as promoted by Indigenous Futurism.
