A 13-minute spell that unravels colonial time itself.
The title of this video, taken from the texts of the architect Kengo Kuma, suggests a way of looking at everything as “interconnected and intertwined” - such as the historical and the present and the tool and the artifact. Images and representations of two structures in the Portland Metropolitan Area that have direct and complicated connections to the Chinookan people who inhabit(ed) the land are woven with audio tapes of one of the last speakers of chinuk wawa, the Chinookan creole. These localities of matter resist their reduction into objects, and call anew for space and time given to wandering as a deliberate act, and the empowerment of shared utility.
Cinematography
Structures that breathe; space filmed as relationship, not setting.
Sound
Chinuk wawa audio as radical act of sonic preservation.
Editing
Woven temporality—past/present refuse linear obedience.
Director
Sky Hopinka
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Chinuk wawa was a trade language that became a tool of survival; by the 2000s, fewer than ten fluent speakers remained.
Hopinka refuses standard documentary 'explaining'—the film enacts the Indigenous epistemology it theorizes, demanding viewers build meaning through relation rather than consumption.
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