ART FICTIONS by Jillian Knipe

October 22, 2025 Reconfigured Memories and Watery Connections (ALINE MOTTA)

Guest artist ALINE MOTTA

joins PELUMI ODUBANJO to discuss her work via 'Water is a Time Machine' by the artist herself. Originally published in Brazilian Portuguese by Fósforo Editora and Luna Parque Edições in 2022, the text reconfigures memories by using a non-linear perception of time and is part of a multi-layered project including video and performance. It includes personal documents that belong to the artist's mother, her calendars and journals from the 1970s and an account of her death in 2011, which is the central piece and backbone of the work.

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Aline and Pelumi discuss the book's stories around the artist's family members and their lives in Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the 20th century, a time of political turmoil which immediately followed the abolition of slavery. Their conversation encompasses floating, bombs, bridges, tuberculosis, mistranslation, iconography, submerging, chemotherapy, prayer, breathing, stoicism, Catholicism, time machines, interracial marriage, film school, personal archives, double images, direct communication, permanent connections, exchanging cells, changing organs, fraught connections, Congolese traditions, disciplinarian mothers, avoiding sugarcoating, intentional disorientation, umbilical cords, oral histories, heavy heartedness, Yoruba influences, colonial erasure, speculative studies, layers of time, writing in fragments, metaphors of motherhood, constructing new narratives, sleeping in hammocks, foundations of thought, clothes being archives, abolition of slavery, lineage as language, contradictions in relationships, the beginning of the Republic, the way histories are told in (black) families, trying to find reasons for a person's death, the magic of making someone breath under water, using words to make maps, connecting personal history with collective history, envisioning new pasts to free us from old narratives and manifest new futures, plus a recipe to treat bruises.

ALINE MOTTA

alinemotta.com

@1alinemotta

'A água é uma máquina do tempo' / 'Water is a time machine'

'(Outros) Fundamentos' / '(Other) Foundations'

'Pontes sobre Abismos' / 'Bridges over the Abyss'

INSTITUTIONS

Bienal de São Paulo 2023 'Choreographies of the Impossible'

Buenos Aires, Palermo Buenos Aires, Argentina

Centre Pompidou, France

MALBA Museo de Arte Lanoamericano de Buenos Aires / Latin American Art Museum of Rietberg Museum, Zurich

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