© CALQ
The haunting question to be or not to be was asked of Elisapie Isaac early on. The songwriter, performer, musician, and director was raised by her adoptive parents in Salluit, Nunavik, before her talent brought her to stages around the world. Often feeling like an expatriate in the South and stranger in the North, she searched for her identity, balance, and truth through art.
Emerging in the duo Taïma, the woman who has been nicknamed “the Beauty of the North” reached an audience in Inuktitut, English, and French.
Her songs and her films are filled with the ghosts of lost friends, forbidden shamans, biological and adoptive parents, destinies frustrated by a dependence on everything that artificially sustains the dreams we no longer dare to dream. But Elisapie also has the knack of looking reality in the face and transforming it through poetry, fleeing forward, opening herself to others without losing herself, and navigating between tradition and modernity.
She is building the future by meandering between the past and the present, the meandering of an uprooted runaway on a constant spiritual quest.
Elisapie moves through a world obsessed with appearances with an open, authentic, and bewitching face, distilling from her soft voice a body of work that is both serious and luminous.
Having become the ambassador of an eclectic Inuit culture in constant transition, she fights for recognition, reconstruction, and rapprochement, and reminds us that the heart speaks the language of wisdom.
About the Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec
The Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec is a distinction bestowed by CALQ honouring those individuals who have played a prominent role in Québec's artistic development.
The CALQ would like to thanks its partners, the Caisse de la Culture and the newspaper Le Devoir.
© CALQ