Seeking to “invent through an inventory”, Brazilian artist Aline Motta works with archives from a starting point of distrust. When dealing with archival research and tracing her family’s genealogy, Aline finds deep connections with ancestry, revealing a memory that is constantly updated.
Aline Motta, (Outros) Fundamentos ((Other) Foundations), 2017-19. Photo: Aline Motta.
A água é uma máquina do tempo (Water is a Time Machine), Video, 2023. Photo: Levi Fanan/ Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
Aline Motta, Filha Natural (Natural Daughter), 2018-19. Photo: Aline Motta.
In the hands of Aline Motta, images resurface, reach consistency, and display their meaning in the present. Motta conducts long periods of research into the history of her family and, in particular, her maternal line, which was intertwined with violence of colonial origin. The stories she tells—through video installations, performance pieces, collages of images and words—leverage the archive as a mnemonic device where personal and collective stories were deposited, often in a non-neutral way. Motta’s work is inserted in the voids, in the silenced lives of the African Diaspora that the archive reveals by tracing affective connections between places and people that a less attentive observer would miss.
C& América Latina: The method of critical fabulation, developed by the scholar Saidiya Hartman, among others, suggests that we start from the virtual multitude of those personal and collective stories that “could have been, but were not”, in order to critically reimagine the archive without repeating the colonial violence that created it. For you, how does your work relate to the possibility of approaching the archive with a critical attitude?
Aline Motta: I talked about this in an essay I wrote, which has the same name as my book and installation at the São Paulo Bienal, A água é uma máquina do tempo (Water is a time machine). In the essay, I seek an equivalent to Saidiya’s method, citing Tiganá Santana, which, in turn, was based on a poem by Jorge Portugal. He talked about “inventing through an inventory”. I think that, especially in Black communities, this inventory is not just a set of documents or an organized photo album, but also the emotional archives of our families. These are generational archives. Dealing with the archive means, first of all, distrusting it and listening carefully to what these sources are not saying. I think the key to measuring whether we are on the right path in our research is when it moves you, energizes you, makes you want to go on creating, instead of draining your strength and leaving you exhausted. It’s very similar to falling in love with someone.
C&AL: How would you describe the experience of dealing with archival research, tracing the genealogy of your own family history, particularly your maternal lineage?
AM: When you’re dealing with documentary archives, you often find stories that aren’t exactly related to your family, but could be, and this exercise of imagination sometimes takes you to places of profound encounter with what we call “ancestry”. These are shared experiences, often traumatic. The idea that this chorus of women’s voices could come out from behind the scenes and take center stage of the narrative was what moved me to keep going, not by reenacting the suffering, but transmuting some of these experiences into creation.
Installation views Solo Exhibition Rio Art Museum "Aline Motta; Memory, Journey and Water" 2020/21. Photo: Elisa Mendes.
C&AL: In your works, archival documents appear in their materiality and not just as accessory virtual images, but becoming active elements of the narration, taking on an autonomous role of protagonist. What is the meaning of highlighting this interaction between the archival image and the world beyond it?
AM: I think it’s the understanding that the archive isn’t located in the past but in the future. It’s situating the archive as a memory of a future in an infinite process of updating. The idea of spiraling time is combined precisely with the dimension that a fragment of a 19th century newspaper contains a capsule of what will be experienced tomorrow, with other characters and nuances, but placing the events within a historical and cyclical perspective.
A água é uma máquina do tempo (Water is a Time Machine), Performance at Sharjah Biennial 15 - Feb. 2023. Credit: Sidney Gerard/ Motaz Mawid / Hélio Menezes.
It’s situating the archive as a memory of a future in an infinite process of updating.
C&AL: Montage, editing, superimposition, switching of perspectives. I’m thinking, for example, of your work Filha Natural (“Natural Daughter”, 2022), exhibited at MASP during the exhibition Histórias Feministas. How, in your artistic practice, does the use of techniques taken from cinema make the presentification of memory possible?
AM: Cinematic language allows the condensation of various points in time and the view of a given scene from various angles. I think that in Filha Natural this use of the camera highlights the superpositions of these temporalities, suggesting a path, a crossing of a gaze. Memory becomes a spectator and also a character in the narrative.
C&AL: I heard you wanted to turn the book into a feature film. Could you tell us about the status of this new project?
AM: Yes. For the moment, the film that was shown at the São Paulo Bienal is half an hour long, but many parts of the book haven’t been filmed yet. So, I’m looking for financing to film the entire book and turn the project into a feature film. The way the film market is set up, there are more possibilities for feature films to be exhibited, so it’s another interesting format for disseminating the work and for the discussions it raises. This aspect relates back to your previous question about the circulation of works. I can see that the works contain this desire for growth and naturally seek their own ways to express themselves, often growing beyond themselves and in constant dialogue with works by other artists and from different languages.
Aline Motta was born in Niterói, Brazil in 1974 and lives in São Paulo. She is a multidisciplinary artist who combines different techniques and artistic practices in her work such as photography, video, installation, performance and collage. Critically, her works reconfigure memories, especially Afro-Atlantic ones, and construct new narratives that evoke a non-linear idea of time.
Giulia Menegale (Venice, Italy, 1975) is a researcher, editor and curator who works between Italy and Brazil. Her research explores radical conceptual artistic practices from the sixties to today, with particular attention to the Latin American context .
Translation: Zoë Perry
ES
PT