The Haitian born artist Widline Cadet uses her photographic practice to reflect on the nature of her diasporic experience, addressing ideas of kinship, intergenerational legacy, and the fragility of memory. Apparent opposites such as presence and absence, fact and fiction, or past and future recur in all shades and nuances.

Cadet combines family archive photos with her own photographs of family, friends, herself, and previously unknown people. Together they form a single archive in which different generations and layers of time exist side by side. Approaching (her family) history through hypothesis creates an interesting dynamic between fact and fiction. Cadet brings both together in a genuine istwa, a Kreyòl word meaning ‘(hi)story’.

The title of the exhibition refers to a multitude of things. As a child, the phrase occurred to her while she was preparing to move from Haiti to the United States; as an adult, it reminds her what to bring when travelling between the two countries. The words also point to photography’s ability to flatten three-dimensional objects and turn them into something you can keep in your pocket. In times of loss they can therefore forge a link between people who are widely separated in space or in time.