While Canada is celebrating its 150th anniversary, Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival is offering an entire month dedicated to photography in all its forms in Toronto. This interdisciplinary festival of 2017 focuses on the subject of the Canadian Confederation’s sesquicentenary and the issues resulting from it. Identity, memory, environment, and colonial history of the country are this edition’s recurring questions.
The name Canada comes from the name “Kanata”, signifying “village” in Huron (the Native American nation Huron-Wendat being from the south of Ontario). We are well aware of the oxymoron present, since this “village” today represents one of the biggest countries in the world, gathering more than fifty First Nations and around 200 ethnic origins. This sociocultural diversity makes it impossible to capture Canada in its entirety, to describe or get a sense of it through one particular event. The sesquicentenary is a good occasion to look at identity, or rather Canadian identities at the current time. That is what CONTACT 2017 asks through different themes.