(2026)
Candice Hopkins and Raven Chacon
Challenging settler-colonial histories and asserting essential truths about the lands we inhabit, the works of composer, musician, and artist Raven Chacon and writer and curator Candice Hopkins interrogate institutional power and reclaim Indigenous sovereignty.
In 2020, Hopkins and Chacon presented Dispatch, their collaborative score inspired by Silent Choir, Chacon’s field recordings made during the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. Dispatch analyzes the dynamics of political organizing while exploring ideas of occupation, exploitation, and the land as witness. For Speaking in Tongues, the artists have continued to address these themes in Codetalker, a new score written in direct response to the recent government attacks upon the safety and civil rights of people living in the United States, justified in the name of immigration policy enforcement and control over our borders. The work is animated by the history of the Navajo Code Talkers who were recruited by the U.S. military to develop secret codes based on the Diné language for the U.S. to use during World War II. Diné is traditionally and primarily an oral language, passed down through generations by way of storytelling and ceremony. Prior to its exploitation for military gain, it was significantly threatened by colonial efforts to assimilate Indigenous communities. Utilizing the code talkers’ lexicon, and embracing the mutability of language itself, Chacon and Hopkins have created a new cipher intended to help us navigate and resist the prevalence of lies and misinformation so rampant in the country today.
The audio from the Codetalker score serves as a sonic line of connection and communication, resisting the forced binaries that political rhetoric and its accompanying obsession with power thrive upon — citizen/alien, heterosexual/non-binary, faith-based/secular — Codetalker is an artwork in the form of instructions for resistance, upholding the belief that creative expression can change hearts and minds and participate meaningfully in the revolution.