Haitian artist Widline Cadet reflects on transforming the absence of family photographs into an expansive meditation on migration, ritual, language, and belonging. She discusses the evolving life of Seremoni Disparisyon, the emotional landscapes of the Black diaspora, and photography’s capacity to preserve the past while imagining new futures.
5 August 2o26
For nearly a decade, Widline Cadet has been building Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance), an evolving body of work that began with a deeply personal question: what happens when family histories survive without photographs?
Through photography, video, installation, and carefully staged environments, Cadet has transformed that absence into a living archive, one that resists nostalgia in favour of imagination, ritual, and possibility. Her first solo museum exhibition in the United States, ‘Currents 40’ at the Milwaukee Art Museum, brings this ambitious project together for the first time, tracing the emotional terrain of migration, generational memory, and Black diasporic life. Cadet reflects on the relationship between images and remembrance, the language of everyday objects, and why archives can be spaces not only of preservation, but of becoming.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: Seremoni Disparisyon began with the absence of family photographs. Over the years, it has grown into what you describe as a living archive. How has this project changed the way you think about photography and its relationship to memory?
Wideline Cadet: Oh, the project has changed in ways I could never have imagined when I started it. One of the major reasons I began making the work is, as you say, to sort of fight against the lack of family photographs, but it’s definitely expanded into so much more than that. It’s hard for me to put into words, but in the beginning I was focused on making the photographs primarily as a means of preserving memories for the future. And I think there are still some aspects of the work that do that, but at some point that changed. I wanted to expand on what I thought an archive could be for me, and that is something that not only preserves memories, feelings, ideas, cultures and the like, but also something that can image / imagine future possibilities. And so what you see in Seremoni Disparisyon is not just an archive of things past, but also one that engages with the present while envisioning various futures.
Absence is a recurring theme in your work, but it often feels present rather than empty. How do you use photography to explore what is missing, forgotten, or left unsaid?
It’s so funny to read this question because I have a Post-it from years ago in my studio space that reads “Absence is a kind of presence,” and it just hangs out there for me to see, and in reading this question, I’m glad that the sentiment has seeped into my work. There are different ways that I’ve used photography to image absence. Sometimes it’s straightforward; other times it’s not.
An example of the straightforward approach is the image titled Bougenvilye, ki itilize pou bote, vi prive sou liy kloti, ak pwoteksyon pikan (Bougainvillaea, Used for Beauty, Privacy on Fence Lines, and Thorny Protection), 2019. In that piece, you see the blanket nestled in this close-up of a landscape; there is an indentation in the shape of where a person could have been sitting. So even though there isn’t an actual person in the frame, their presence can still be felt by the shape of the indentation on the blanket.
An example of a less straightforward one would be Seremoni disparisyon #1 (Ritual [Dis]Appearance #1), 2019. I made the image while living in the U.S., trying to capture my memories of living in Haiti. The thing is I didn’t have access to Haiti at the time, and so I decided to use the ocean as a sort of liminal space to create a fictionalised landscape that could stand in as a representation of Haiti and the things I associated with it in my memories.
Your work engages with migration in ways that go beyond physical movement. How do you approach the emotional and generational effects of migration through your images?
This is a hard one to explain. When thinking about migration in my work, it’s more than just movement of people from one place to another. There’s so much more to be considered in the conversation, and for me that includes what gets moved in between places as a result of the people’s movement, and how that gets moved, and what the effects of said movement are. The reason I’m able to do that is that my family’s currently in the process of experiencing it. There are currently three generations of my family living in the U.S., and we’ve all had vastly different experiences, and that’s something I am both fascinated and saddened by at times.
Language would be a perfect way to think through this. My mom speaks mostly Kreyòl. Kreyòl used to be my first language, but after living in the U.S. for so long, English is now my first language. With the exception of one, my nieces and nephews only speak English. And so between the generations, there is a dynamic of grandparents and grandchildren who don’t speak the same language. That’s something I think about a lot. What are the emotional effects of this, and how does that change what is or is not communicated or passed between the generations?
Repetition appears throughout Seremoni Disparisyon, whether through gestures, figures, or compositions. What draws you to repetition as a way of exploring memory and family history?
I think it’s an obsession at this point. It manifests in different ways, but I would say I go through phases of different interests when I’m making work and usually feel compelled to repeat the thing until I feel I reach the end of it. I would also say that part of it stems from the fact that I started this body of work from a lack of family photographs and memories, and so the few that I did have I felt compelled to look at them, remake them, look at them again, analyse them, and remake them in various ways over and over again to the point where it becomes distorted.
This exhibition brings together photography, video, family archives, and installation. How did working across different media help you tell the story of this project in new ways?
Working on this exhibition marks the first time that all these different aspects of my practice have come together on this scale, and I think essentially what it does is it opens up how the stories and ideas in the work can be viewed, heard, felt and experienced in different ways. If looking at photographic works doesn’t work for you as an entryway into the work, then maybe the installations can do that; if not the installations, then maybe the video work. Having these different elements opens up the ways people can enter, read, and connect with my work. I would also add the curatorial vision of Kristen Gaylord, the exhibition design by David Russick, and hanging style to the list of components that are also being utilised in conjunction with the various forms of media to expand the overall breadth of the work in the exhibition.
Your work often moves between personal experience and collective history. How do you balance telling your family’s story while speaking to broader experiences within the Black diaspora?
I try not to force it. It took me a while to figure this out, but as niche as I may think my family’s stories or circumstances may be, there’s always someone else out there experiencing some part or version of it. And so I just make the work that I want to make, put it out into the world, and hope that it finds and connects with whoever it needs to. And sometimes when I’m lucky it brings those people to me.
‘Currents 40’ is your first solo museum exhibition in the United States. What does this moment mean to you, and what conversations do you hope the exhibition will open up?
This moment feels really special for so many reasons. I grew up in the U.S. during the second half of my childhood, and that’s when I fell in love with art and making. But I didn’t necessarily see stories like mine reflected or represented in museum spaces. So to not only see that shift over the years, but also to have my own exhibition as part of the canon, means the world to me. This exhibition is also the first time I get to see this many of my works in one space and really contemplate what I’ve been doing over the past seven or so years and how so many of my relationships have changed as a result of making this work. Needless to say, the installation process and just having the show up has been very emotional for me.
Family photographs, everyday objects, and rituals play an important role in your work. What interests you about these small, intimate details as ways of preserving history and memory?
So much of the aesthetics in my work comes from the environments I’ve lived in; as a result of that, I do place a lot of importance on the everyday objects that inhabit these spaces. I may be an artist, but at the core of it, I’m so fascinated by what the things we surround ourselves with say about us, the roles they play in our everyday lives, and the kinds of life that they’ve been imbued with.
This exhibition is on view at the Herzfeld Centre for Photography and Media Arts from 8 May until 9 August 2026.
