Water is a Time Machine, video, 2023, 31:48
Do Not Cut the Negatives, video loop, 2023, 1:10
Water is a Time Machine, book, 144 pages, 2025
“I am pregnant with my mother. It is my turn to carry you in my belly. The gestation lasts the time it takes to write a book. Now you can close your eyes. Now you can close your eyes, at the bottom of a sea,” states the entry lines of a film in the quiet voice of the artist.
Through transtemporal picturesque images of Brazil — the same scenery that once
made the country so attractive to colonizers — through the colors red and blue, through rhythmic juxtapositions, through bird’s-eye views of Rio de Janeiro that impassively depicts dramatic social divisions, through a collective spirit and fragments of archival material, we are guided through the lives and deaths of Aline Motta’s mother, grandmother, and ancestors. The film moves in a circular narrative structure inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation. It connects the end and beginning of life; personal loss intertwines with the abolition of slavery and its traces in the country’s present.
The soundtrack is a subtle composition by Motta’s consisting of manipulated car noises, instruments made from 18th and 19th-century drawings of African instruments done by foreign travelers that visited Brazil — revived by a musician Spirito Santo — and the directed improvisation of Jéssica Gaspar who reinterprets the music of Brazil’s first female conductor, Chiquinha Gonzaga.
A água é uma máquina do tempo.
Even if one does not understand Brazilian Portuguese, it is worth the attempt to taste the title in its original language. Sometimes, the acoustic image of a word is a more accurate conveyor of meaning than its literal translation. Like a dissolving substance, the title transforms in one’s mouth, transcending its original form to evoke new situated meanings. In Central African cosmo-perceptions inherited by Afro-Brazilians, as Motta shares in her text ‘Water is a Time Machine’ in the journal Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, “a fine line of water called Kalunga separates the dimension of the living from that of the dead.” It is from this spiritual place that Motta’s words rise to reach us.
- Yaniya Mikhalina
- 1/2
Aline Motta. Water is a Time Machine. 2023. Film still. Courtesy Aline Motta - 2/2
Aline Motta "Do Not Cut the Negatives", 2023. Installation detail. Courtesy Aline Motta. Photo Daniel Cabrel
Photo: Marilia Camelo
Aline Motta (she/her, b.1974, Niterói) is a visual artist and writer. Basing her work on speculative studies that combine archival research, field trips and oral history reports, her artistic practice seeks to point out colonial erasures in her family history, and to fill the gaps. Her work consists of videos, photographs, installations and performances. Recent exhibitions include: Sharjah Biennial 15, 2023; Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, 2023; 35th São Paulo Biennial, 2023; and Stellenbosch Triennale, 2025. Motta lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.
Production credits
Aline Motta, A água é uma máquina do tempo (Water is a Time Machine), video installation, 2023, 31:48
Aline Motta, Não corte os negativos (Do not Cut the Negatives), video loop, 2023, 1:10
Photo credits: Daniel Cabrel
Video Credits:
Camera operators: Aline Motta, Caio Rosa, Daniel Cabrel, Lucas Magalhães
Camera assistant: Flavio Muniz
Drone operator: Francisco “Cochi” Guimarães
Additional drone operator: Felipe Macedo
G&E: Luther Modesto
Video Projection: Daniel Cabrel
Video Projection assistant: Juliana Bento
Production coordinators: Caio Rosa and Giulia Maria Reis
Costume designer: Aline Motta
Costume tailor: Awa Guimarães
Editing: Aline Motta and Ana Julia Travia
Post-production supervisor: Tatiana Macedo
Supervising colorist: Maísa Joanni
Colorist: Diran Serafim e/and Maísa Joanni
Motion Graphics: Marina Quintanilha
Motion Graphics assistant: Thais Suguiyama
Soundtrack: Aline Motta, Jessica Gaspar, Spirito Santo
Music Production and Sound Mixing: Pedro Santiago
Audiovisual and acoustics consultant: Doo Sung You
5.1 Sound mixing: Confraria de Charutos
Musicians: Spirito Santo and Caio Rosa
Singers: Jessica Gaspar and Spirito Santo
English subtitles: Sophie Lewis and Julia Sanches
Photographic archive research: Aline Motta and Martin Passos
Performers: Aline Motta and Mariana Silva
Commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation and co-commissioned by Fundação Bienal. It was also funded in part by ZUM Photography Grant Instituto Moreira Salles, Brazil and “Coincidencia” Program Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
Aline Motta,
Water is a Time Machine, 2025
book, 144 pages
Published by Torpedo Press and Trondheim kunstmuseum
English translation: Sophie Lewis and Julia Sanches
Design: Aline Motta
Printer: Livonia Press
Publisher: Torpedo Press
Edition: 300
ISBN: 978-82-93104-40-7
