Spiral Genealogies in Aline Motta

ABSTRACT This article analyzes processes of activation, performative enactment, and invention of an Afro-diasporic ancestral memory in the book A água é uma máquina do tempo [The Water is a Time Machine] (2022) and in the video Filha Natural [Natural Daughter] (2019), by Aline Motta, a contemporary Brazilian multi-artist. In these pieces of work, the poetic exhumation of victims of the Black Atlantic precedes the ancestralization of the dead relegated to oblivion by the colonial power and its founding racial apparatus that tensions the present. Investigating the traumatic crossings of slavery in its genealogy, Motta revisits photographs, diaries, certificates, newspapers, and spoils of slaveholders, allocating her ancestors as protagonists of these materialities. The colonial archive is stirred in the aesthetic transcreation of its textualities and through a body that performs and updates ancestral knowledge. Thus, the insubordinate handling of the formal hybridism of the archive inscribes, in the meshes of History and the spirals of ancestral time, black women who share an important cultural, affective, and political legacy.