This event is part of the 2023 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora.
Please note that this event has been moved from the Stanley Art Museum to 101 BCSB.
With her artistic practice, Aline Motta (b. 1974, Niterói, Brazil) seeks to point out and fill in the gaps in her own family history as a result of colonial erasure. Her videos, photographs, installations, and performances are based on speculative studies that mix archival research, field trips, and oral history reports that she uses to access, nourish, and reveal parts of the past that were previously thought to be lost. Refusing the linear organization of time and instead understanding the past as part of the present, Motta creates works that reorient memories and construct new narratives. Reflecting on notions of diaspora, belonging, and identification she reconfigures Afro-Atlantic relations in her own ways, positioning herself as the author of her own history.
Miryam Charles is a Haitian-Canadian director, producer and cinematographer living in Montreal. She has produced several short and feature films. Her films have been presented in various festivals in Quebec and internationally. Her first feature film This House was presented at the Berlinale, the AFI film festival this year and was also included in the TIFF Top 10 of the year. She also launched the short film At Dusk at the Locarno Film Festival. As a producer, she is currently working on the post-production of the series Still I Rise.
Aline Motta's Intervention is called "Water is a Time Machine," where it is a multilayered project surrounding 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. It also includes personal documents that belonged to the artist's mother, her calendars and journals from the ’70s, and an account of her death in 2011, which is the central piece and backbone of this work. Comprised of a fiction book, a video and a performance, it explores the intersections between literature and the visual arts. Between word and image, archive and fabulation, it reconfigures memories by using a nonlinear perception of time.
Miryam Charles's Interventions is titled "For Simone":
A moment of silence, then a new start.
Introducing parallel lives in the hope perhaps for a better world.
Across time, across continents.
I return to an island, a country that I never knew.
If only in a dream.
Here.
I present a short filmic essay in which a sound research is combined, towards an impossible destination.
Free and open to all.
Major sponsorship comes from the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, UI International Programs, the Stanley-UI Foundation Support Organization, and the Office of the Vice President for Research Arts and Humanities Initiative Program. Generous supporters include FilmScene, the UI Stanley Museum of Art, the UI Department of Cinematic Arts, and the UI Department of Spanish & Portuguese.