Artists Silvia Rosi and Widline Cadet are using photography to reinterpret their families' migration histories through staged self-portraiture.
These works highlight the intersection of personal identity and historical trauma. By filling archival gaps with imagined imagery, the artists challenge how migration is documented and remembered within the diaspora.
Rosi, featured by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, uses her art to engage with the past. "I'm not just performing, but reflecting on history," Rosi said.
Similarly, Widline Cadet has spent 10 years imagining her family archive. A feature published May 15, 2026 [1], detailed how the Haitian-American artist creates works based on her family's journey from Haiti to New York. Because Cadet lacked childhood photos, she used her own image to visualize the experiences of her ancestors.
Both artists focus on the concept of belonging. Their process involves a deliberate reconstruction of memory, a way to reclaim a narrative that was often lost or fragmented during the migration process.
While Rosi's work is showcased within the institutional setting of MoMA, Cadet's project emphasizes the void left by missing documentation. Both utilize the camera not to capture a present reality, but to manifest a historical one. The resulting images serve as synthetic archives for families whose stories were not traditionally preserved in photographs.
“"I'm not just performing, but reflecting on history."”
The work of Rosi and Cadet represents a broader movement in contemporary art where creators act as archivists for their own lineages. By using self-portraiture to replace missing historical records, these artists shift the focus of migration narratives from external documentation to internal, lived experience. This approach allows the diaspora to reclaim agency over their history, transforming the absence of records into a creative tool for identity formation.
