Containers of Culture

Sky Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. A big part of Hopinka’s artistic practice grapples with the accelerated disappearance with language and attempting to resist it. For him, language is a container of culture.

“There are so many different ways of looking at the world with the language that you speak, sometimes you notice it and sometimes you don’t”, he explains. “The language that I learned from from my different tribes, they taught me how the landscape and different cultural aspects that are precious can only be understood within the language.”

The session starts with an observation by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, who refers to a provocative idea by the late French writer and poet Edouard Glissant about how we live in an “age of homogenized globalisation” in which cultural phenomenon, such as languages, are beginning to disappear—and why we need to resist that.