Country: Canada
Residency dates: September 4 – October 4, 2026
Public presentation: October 30 at 1:00 p.m. at Espace 517
Residency project
During her residency at Atelier Circulaire, Michaëlle plans to continue researching the relationship between hand weaving and textile screen printing, using archival photographs and texts. Her work explores how these images change when printed on irregular textile surfaces, whose structure, density, and material qualities directly shape how the images appear.
In 2025, she worked with Dominique Desbiens at Atelier Circulaire to develop screen printing techniques for fabrics she had woven herself. This experience deepened her research into inks and the interactions between image and fibre. The residency will allow her to continue these experiments by producing 8 to 12 works using different fibres, textures, and printing techniques, including plant-based and pigment inks.
The resulting fragments will also inform her textile design research and may be transformed into wearable pieces, treating clothing as an extension of the exhibition space.
Biography and artistic practice
Michaëlle Sergile (born in Chicago; based in Canada) is an artist and independent curator. She spent her early childhood in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, before moving to Canada. Her work draws on archives, particularly texts and visual documents dating from the postcolonial period, from 1950 to the present. Through weaving, her artistic practice seeks to understand and rewrite the histories of Black communities, particularly those of women and communities living at various intersections.
Often viewed as a craft associated with women, weaving becomes, in her hands, a language for examining relationships of gender and ethnicity.
Sergile has recently exhibited at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art de Joliette, and the Dakar Biennale Off. She was longlisted for the prestigious Sobey Art Award in 2022 and named Visual Artist of the Year at the 2023 Gala Dynastie. That same year, she began a residency at the Darling Foundry. In 2024, she presented a solo exhibition at the McCord Stewart Museum. In 2025, she exhibited at the Centre culturel de Paris and undertook textile residencies at Lottozero in Italy and the Icelandic Textile Centre in Iceland.
Her work explores the histories of Black communities through archives, with an emphasis on the experiences of women of African descent across different geographic regions. Through weaving, a medium historically associated with women, she examines structures of power shaped by ethnicity, gender, and displacement. She is particularly interested in what Saidiya Hartman describes as “archival violence”: the omissions, erasures, and silences that structure historical archives. Rather than seeking to fill these gaps, her practice uses installation, textiles, and moving images to imagine other forms of transmission.
Her research takes a diasporic rather than territorial perspective. She traces the movements of Black women across geographies, shaped by history, displacement, and political upheaval. Through this approach, she explores how memory, language, and identity travel, fragment, and take shape again across borders and generations. Textiles remain central to her work, while video and installation allow materials and space to play an active role in reflecting on history.
Domestic space and architecture are recurring motifs in her recent projects. By referencing vernacular structures shaped by colonial and postcolonial conditions, she considers how built environments hold memory and encode histories of migration. In response to the ongoing loss of monuments and archives in Haiti, where she spent her childhood, her work approaches re-archiving as a critical act. Through weaving and spatial installation, she seeks to create alternative sites of memory where material, image, and structure resist erasure and affirm diasporic presence.