Beyond the Metaverse with OurWorlds: Indigenous Stories are All Around You

Exhibit creators Kilma S. Lattin, Catherine Eng, Stanley Rodriguez and Ana Gloria Rodriguez present narrative moving-image scenes overlaying the landscape on which UC San Diego stands with Native histories and futures, featuring woven baskets and boats.

The Gallery QI is open 12 – 5 p.m. Monday-Friday to the UC San Diego community and the public. “Beyond the Metaverse with OurWorlds: Indigenous Stories are All Around You” will be on display in Atkinson Hall through March 17, 2023.

Summary:

What can Kumeyaay art and design – past, present, and future – teach us about the value of Indigenous knowledge and practice in a culture where humanity, the natural world, and media are irreversibly converged? This exhibition foregrounds work from OurWorlds about Kumeyaay weaving and boat-building featured in the flagship project of OurWorlds, an extended reality platform led by Kilma Lattin and Catherine Eng. The Kumeyaay people once lived on the land on which UC San Diego is sited, yet their history is nowhere visible. OurWorlds enters this breach by reinstating Kumeyaay culture and history onto the land on which we stand, bringing to life the history embedded in our landscape as a sign of the future. Narrative moving-image scenes overlay the landscape on which we stand with Native histories and futures, and featuring woven baskets and boats. On view is the making and use of tule boats, or ha kwaiyo–canoes made of tule reeds, which grow along the region’s rivers and lakes. The boats, produced collectively in a multi-year initiative led by elder Dr. Stanley Rodriguez (Santa Ysabel Kumeyaay), have been used in launches throughout the region that bring together Native communities and the broader region’s peoples in celebrations of the waterways that the Kumeyaay have navigated and harvested for 12,000 years. Also on display is the basketry work of Ana Gloria “Martha” Rodriguez (Jose de la Zorra Kumeyaay) and other regional artists shown in her Kosay Kumeyaay Market in Old Town, San Diego.