Turning Back, Looking Forward: Manifesting Futures in Will Wilson’s Auto Immune Response

In 2004- a year before uranium mining was outlawed in the Navajo Nation- Diné/Navajo artist Will Wilson began work on an ongoing project titled Auto Immune Response (AIR). Throughout this series of digital photographs and installations, Wilson visualizes himself as the last man alive among post-apocalyptic Diné lands and structures, marked as such by the artist’s donning of a gas mask. The artist can be seen moving through this landscape, often pausing to look at his laptop or spread yellow corn pollen over the landscape. Within this world various frames often collide in one image through digital manipulation. This temporal flattening suggests the non-linear nature of time as Wilson concurrently turns back to the past and looks forward to the future through the lens of his camera and Diné ideologies. Weaving together conversations around Indigenous Futurisms, visual sovereignty, and what I term a politics of refusal, this paper asserts that Will Wilson’s AIR series makes futures manifest by engaging in customary Diné practices that center Diné bodies and Diné lands outside Western notions of time and progress. In this way he makes clear how Diné practices are themselves futuristic technologies, employed in order to envision thriving futures beyond the destruction of lands, peoples, and lifeways undertaken through settler colonialism. Indigenous Futurisms therefore operate in Wilson’s photographs to illuminate a world not yet manifest, but full of possibilities beyond the traumas of resource extraction. In his visions of a world lost, Wilson highlights the possibilities of another one newly begun.