Esery Mondesir. Film still from Katherine, 2019. Hand-processed 16mm film transferred to HD video, duration 3 min 31 sec, looping. Courtesy of the artist. © Esery Mondesir
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Toronto-based artist-filmmaker Esery Mondesir describes the impulse that fuels his art practice as “a search for kinship.” At the heart of his work is Mondesir’s connection to the Haitian diaspora, based on his own experience of migration: the artist left Haiti, his country of birth, at the age of 28.
Mondesir mines personal archives, institutional collections, music, and oral histories to chart and connect people and places with links to Haiti. The film footage, score, passport photographs, and text presented here are expressions of his search. They reflect an extended family he has found, across decades, and connecting Toronto, Havana, Montreal, Port-au-Prince, and the Oti region of Ghana.
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