Origines
Media installation, 2021

Origines, is a two-channel media installation created from footage of Claude Jutra’s 1963 film À Tout Prendre (Take it All), one of the first Canadian films to feature an interracial relationship. It explores his then lover and film co-star Johanne Harrelle’s complicated quest for identity as a Black francophone woman in Canada. It takes two different versions of the Haitian folk song Choucoune, both sung by Harrelle, as the starting point of a reflection on Blackness and belonging as specifically experienced by Harrelle, but also in the broader context of the implicit whiteness of Canadian society.

The installation was produced as part of a residency at Library and Archives Canada through Archive/Counter-Archive and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.