Message
This book is a film to text translation of Sky Hopinka’s film ‘Visions of an Island’. Through hallucinatory images of a sublime island in the Bering Sea and conversations with the local people, Hopinka’s film tells the story of the Aleut people and their island.
I used a variety of visual techniques to communicate Hopinka’s message, the tone of his film and its context. A key conceptual element of the book is the ‘alphabet sheet’ sections. After researching the Aleut people I learnt of the horrors they endured across generations, inflicted on them by Russian colonisers and later American. A key take away from this research was that the written Aleut language was originally designed by the Russian colonisers in Cyrillic to allow them to control the native people. Later, it was re-devised as a Latin alphabet by the Americans. Both alphabets are printed in the book chronologically in historical order. I experimented with laser cutting the alphabets onto a block and used them to de-boss the letters onto pages at the end of the book. As a part of a wider concept explored throughout the book, this visual symbolism aims to communicate the reclamation of the language by the local people in the post colonial era.
It is bound with a Coptic stitch and printed on recycled 120 gsm cartridge paper. The chosen format is A6 with the intention of giving the book the appearance of a travellers pocket journal.
