In the intersection between family oral tradition and archival research, Aline Motta establishes a field of investigation from which she can approach the narratives of her ancestors and origins, arriving at collective contexts and reinventing historical memories of Brazil’s families. Her works draw upon a central question that reflects on the fragility of so-called official discourses: “To what extent is reality fictional?” Understanding time as cyclical, Motta turns to the signifiers that have been documented by official history. She explores public and private archives, field research, oral accounts, vestiges, clues, hypotheses and fictionalizations. Filha natural [Natural Daughter] (2018–2019) tells the story of Francisca, her great-great-grandmother, who was enslaved on a coffee plantation in Vassouras, Rio de Janeiro. A death certificate found during her research in Vassouras and the fragmented memories of close relatives bring to the fore a unique analysis of the iconography of slavery, uniting her family’s personal and collective memory, whose narratives have been retraced by the artist through her investigation of historical documents and public archives. By creating an overlap between the imperial era and the present, Motta reveals ancestral relations between black women, as they share common histories that begin in Africa, continuing through the diaspora and slavery and arriving at the current reality faced by black people in Brazil today. In the work, Claudia Mamede, a community leader from Vassouras, appears as a ghost, observing the passage of time on an iconic farm from the region, possibly the same farm once recorded in the historical photographs depicting the place where the artist’s ancestors lived. Employing a high degree of formal rigor and freedom of language experimentation that oscillates between literature, artist’s books, video, photography and performance, Motta’s need to re-live lives deleted from history turns her production into a testament to the urgencies of the present: a time when our histories must be retold by those who were and still are forced into silence.
— Beatriz Lemos, master in social history of culture, PUC‑RJ, 2019
