MP Hopkins

About the work

Lingo is an ongoing project I began in 2018. The project revolves around an iterative text I generate using found materials that deal with speaking and listening in differing ways – poetic and literary texts, linguistic theory, instruction manuals, philosophy, and wikihow web pages. These materials are cut-up, combined, altered via online writing tools, partially redacted, and re-arranged. This process repeats – and the text grows – as new found materials are intermittently added in.

For witness, collector, archivist, narrator I worked with a single page from the Lingo text to produce photographs and a film and sound work. These works aim to convey the strange movement and shape of language I experience in generating the text – the irregular rhythm and murky contours of a narrative that is continuously folding in on itself.

Image courtesy of the artist