Yann Datessen

Friday 6 November – Monday 25 January

Museu Nacional de Etnologia, Lisbon

Nitassinan is a photographic project by Yann Datessen, which proposes a documentary journey through seven of the eleven reserves of the Innu nation, located between Quebec and Labrador. The term “Nitassinan”, which means “our land” in the Innu language, designates an ancestral territory inhabited for more than 10,000 years. Between 2022 and 2025, Yann Datessen developed a work of prolonged immersion in this territory, accompanying its members in different seasons of the year and documenting their ways of life, the social transformations, the relationship with the territory and the cultural continuities. Based on listening, proximity and attentive observation of everyday life, the project builds a contemporary portrait of a people whose history is marked by resistance and by the struggle to preserve their identity and autonomy. Conceived in collaboration with the Musée ilnu de Mashteuiatsh (where the project's archive will be kept), Nitassinan contributes to a reflection on the forms of representation of indigenous peoples and on the conditions for building a shared visual memory between history, identity and narrative sovereignty. Wednesday to Monday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. photography.

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