Lineage, Language: Archival Fabulations in Water is a Time Machine

Abstract

The article investigates Aline Motta’s artistic and political fabulation in Water is a Time Machine (2022). Making use of archive materials, her language reenacts “poetry by other means” (Perloff 2010). On the other hand, her research on her own lineage, which intertwines with the history of black lives in Brazil, points to other horizons of invention. In dialogue with reflections by Leda Martins on ‘spiraling time’, by Saidiya Hartman on ‘critical fabulation’ and by Marylin Strathern on contemporary kinship studies, we observe how the artist performs a phantomalization related to her matrilineal genealogy.