Aline Motta - Filha Natural #6 2018-2019. Courtesy of the artist
Curator Alex Ungprateeb Flynn speaks with artist Aline Motta on erasure, diaspora, and the blurring of boundaries between what is known and what is imagined.
Water is a time machine in the investigation of our family histories. We make, we project, we erase, in a continual process of speculation on the positioning of our bodies in relation to others in this world. Aline Motta’s practice enters into dialogue with erasure, diaspora, and the blurring of boundaries between what is known and what is imagined through video, photography, installation, and performance. These interventions draw on archival research, ethnographic work, and critical fabulation to reimagine that which was previously lost. In a temporal subversion, Motta refuses to consider the discrete and bounded; instead, each present moment interpenetrates with another to inscribe – in a creative gesture – a future as yet uninscribed. Reflecting on notions of diaspora, belonging and identification, she puts forward a deeply personal reading of Afro-Atlantic relations, positioning herself as the author of her own history. In the blurring of boundaries between what is known and what is imagined, Motta’s works demonstrate how envisioning new pasts can free us from linear narratives towards the manifestation of alternative futures.
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auflynn [at] arts.ucla.edu
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is an Assistant Professor at the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, University of California, Los Angeles. Working as an anthropologist and curator, Alex’s practice explores the intersection of ethnographic and curatorial modes of enquiry. Researching collaboratively with activists, curators and artists in Brazil since 2007, Alex explores the prefigurative potential of art in community contexts, prompting the theorisation of fields such as the production of knowledge, the pluriversal, and the social and aesthetic dimensions of form.