I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become

2016
HD video, projection (13 mins)  

I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become is an elegy to the Anishinaabe and Chemehuevi poet and performer Diane Burns. Burns’ direct and wry poems engage with themes of Native American identity and stereotypes and Hopinka’s film flows from that same lineage, maintaining a visual poetry in the same spirit. The film lingers on the shapes of mortality, being, and the forms the transcendent spirit takes while descending upon landscapes of life and death. A space is created for movements and songs to be removed from a certain location in space and time, deterratorialized and syncopated with new mythologies and defining old routes of reincarnation.  This space is one where resignation gives hope for another opportunity, another form, for a return to the alternations of the living and all their refractions.   

Supported by: Swedish Film Institute  

Sky Hopinka works with video, photo, and text. Whilst in Portland, Oregon, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His practice centres on personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media.  

Hopinka has recently exhibited or screened at: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; LUMA; Whitney Biennial; Centre Pompidou; FRONT Triennial; Prospect.5; Toronto International Film Festival; Ann Arbor; Courtisane Festival; Punto de Vista; and the New York Film Festival 

Röda Sten Konsthall