American-African Memories in the Work of Contemporary Brazilian Artists

Memory refers to a set of psychic functions that allow the updating of images of past events or events that are represented as past. Unlike historical studies, memory studies highlight subjectivities, expand the discussion beyond memory and oblivion, and shift the debate towards who has the right to narrate their history and those who are in it. The concerns about memory and its places also become visible in the restless artistic horizon, in which recent and distant pasts are articulated in registers about various forms of trauma. This paper proposes a reflection on the relationship between art and memory based on the production of two contemporary Brazilian artists: Rosana Paulino (Sao Paulo, 1968) and Aline Motta (Niteroi, 1974). The analysis of this production is based on the interdisciplinary nature of memory studies and highlights how artistic creation offers a possibility of individual and collective resignification. Likewise, it conceptualizes African-American memories as those that emerge not only in the individual memory of the artists presented in this article, but also in that of many other women who identify with Africa-America, as a reference ethnogeographic system. They are African-American memories because they have been born in resistance and creativity against oppression, humiliation and dehumanization, and because they insurrect against the unique history, proposing a review of the historiography of the country and the art produced out of those places.