Reimagined Family Ties: Redressing Memory through Photography in Aline Motta’s "Pontes sobre abismos" and "Filha Natural"

Abstract

This article investigates the work of Aline Motta, a contemporary Brazilian artist who is proposing different ways of looking at the past while also addressing the interlocking forms of oppression at work in the present. Through her collaborations with ancestors, in which photography plays a crucial role, the artist reflects on the colonial trauma of over three centuries of genocide, slavery and colonization in Brazil. Moreover, I argue that her work invites a rearrangement of our perception of time and contributes to a critique of linear temporality, evincing the falseness of any narrative of the past as single, stable and flowing in only one direction. This research is guided by questions such as: How can photography serve as a medium of fabulation and of imagining family ties across time and space? And how can these gestures signal the way, if not toward healing, towards an ever-incomplete practice of redress?