Dislocation Blues

2017 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

16:57 minutes

Sky Hopinka

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Dislocation Blues by Sky Hopinka is a portrait of the 2016 Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in South Dakota. Working against grand narratives and myth-making, Hopinka attempts to provide a clear look towards the participants of the protest movement and the protectors of the water – their testimonies, reflections, and histories. In the film, Cleo Keahna tells about the everyday life of the camp and its difficulties and Terry Running Wild shares his dreams for the future. Dislocation Blues is a singular perspective on a protest that garnered much attention from the media, raising questions about social justice, environmentalism ,and the connection between humanity and nature in a manner that refuses to succumb to pathos and exceeds in maintaining a low-key clarity. Hopinka acknowledges the difficulty in framing a movement that continues to signify many things to many people, not to mention a national story unfolding against a backdrop of extraordinary partisan politics in the United States. The artist describes the work as an attempt to engender empathy that reaches beyond horror and pity. As such, open-ended questions of gender, collaboration, and the media take the place of spectacle and graphic violence against Indigenous People or explicit environmental concerns. Dislocation Blues suggests that in the presently fractured social, political, and geographical landscape, the personal is more political than ever.

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Sky Hopinka is from the Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa , a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. Through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media, Hopinka’s practice focuses on personal positions of homeland and landscape. His work investigates language design and the facets of culture it reproduces and contains, as well as the interplay between access to the known and the unknowable.

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Colors:

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• protest.n.02
• exploitation.n.01
• colonialism.n.01
• environmentalism.n.02
• autochthonal.s.01