In this video work, images of friends and landscapes are cut, fragmented and reassembled on an overhead projector as hands guide their shape and construction. The voice tells a story about a not too distant past, a not too distant ruin, with traces of nostalgia expressed in terms of lore. People see knowledge and memory passed down and shared not from wistful loss, but as a collage of rumination, reproduction and creation.

Sky Hopkina is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. A filmmaker, video artist and photographer, Hopinka has received numerous honors for his innovative approach to cinema, including a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2021 Forge Project Fellowship and a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship. Hopinka layers imagery, sound and text to center personal perceptions of Native homelands as well as correlations between language and culture in relation to home and land. Hopinka has said, “Deconstructing language [through cinema] is a way for me to be free from the dogma of traditional storytelling and then, from there, to explore or propose more of what Indigenous cinema has the possibility to look like.”