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.
