Until the next 7 September, Casa América presents the photographic exhibition Take this with you / Pran sa avèk ou, by Widline Cadet.
This artist of Haitian origin uses his photographic practice to reflect on the nature of his diasporic experience, addressing ideas such as kinship, the intergenerational legacy and the fragility of memory. Apparent opposites like presence and absence, reality and fiction or past and future are repeated in all their nuances.
Cadet combines images from family archives with the photographs she takes of her own family and friends, previously unknown people and self-portraits. Together they form a single file in which different generations and temporal layers coexist. Approaching your family’s history through hypotheses creates an interesting dynamic between reality and fiction. Cadet brings together both in an authentic “istwa”, word kreyòl that means history.
The exhibition title [Take this with you] refers to a lot of things. As a child, the phrase came to her while preparing for her transfer from Haiti to the United States; as an adult, it reminds her of what she should carry when traveling between the two countries. The words also point to the ability of photography to flatten three-dimensional objects and turn them into something that can be kept in your pocket. In times of loss they can therefore forge a bond between people who are very far apart in space or time.
