INDIAN TIME


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Canada – 2017 / 2018

Elena Perlino carried out Indian Time during four visits to the Québec-Labrador border. Her photo series runs through the Innu and Naskapi communities, between Natashquan, Mani-Utenam, Matimekosh-Lac-John, Kawawachikamach and Sheshatshiu. She traveled through these spaces and these singular times – marked by ritual, by the passing of traditions, and by day-to-day life – so that we may enter into “nordicity,” and come as close as possible to those who inhabit it. Indian Time sets off to encounter landscapes and human stories that reveal the chaotic traces left by a recent history of Québec, like the mining companies carrying out operations in Schefferville. Each image invites us to revisit the established order and to follow along with the artist’s sensitive gaze, above and beyond a documentary vision.

The project was undertaken in the context of Rencontres internationales de la photographie en Gaspésie in 2017 with the support of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Montreal, and will take the form of a book and a traveling exhibition in a part of North America (Montreal, Matimekush/Schefferville) and in Europe. It is being presented in Gespeg so that the historical and essential links between the Innu and Naskapi communities and the Mi’gmaq of Gespeg may endure and be strengthened.

Claire Moeder

Photographs by PERLINO Elena