Caroline Monnet finds meaning in the border spaces and experiments with strategies for change

Caroline Monnet is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist whose work experiments with many languages, art forms and genres to search out and dwell with the dualities, grey areas, and forms of hybridity that resonate with her own personal experience of inhabiting a self that exists across multiple languages and competing and conflicting cultural histories. Currently based in Montreal, she has exhibited across Canada and across the globe. Caroline's short film Mobilize (https://www.nfb.ca/film/mobilize/) takes you on a feverish, exhilarating journey from the Far North to the urban south, and her more recent video installation “Transatlantic” (https://www.schirn.de/en/magazine/context/2021/caroline_monnet/caroline_monnet_transatlantic/) takes us on an immersive and disruptive trip across the colonial route of the Atlantic ocean. She is currently in post-production on her first feature-length narrative film Bootlegger (https://microclimatfilms.com/en/films/bootlegger/) which won best screenplay at Cannes’ Cinefondation in 2017 and has just been picked up by an international distributor. The film is a community-oriented engagement with ideas of self-determination, finding a cohesive sense of self in a world of borders, and the sort of individual and collective resilience required to endure through trauma. In this interview she talks about how the pandemic has influenced the way she thinks about producing art and how returning to her original, more improvisational approach to creating allows her to produce with the greatest amount of self-assurance and freedom.