Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea

Rua Serpa Pinto, 4 | Rua Capelo, 13 1200-444 Lisboa

21 . 11 . 2025 → 01 . 02 . 2026

tuesday - sunday → 10:00 am – 01:00 pm :: 02:00 pm – 06:00 pm

Last entry → 5:30 pm

Artist

Aline Motta

This is a project about life.

If all we do in life is to cross abysses, this project is about bridges. Bridges of words and images, bridges in search of understanding. Bridges over the Atlantic. It is a project that talks about my family, but it could also talk about yours.

The story unfolds as a secret surfaces. A grandmother’s secret to a granddaughter. What in someone’s life story should be remembered and what should be forgotten? How do we heal personal, family and collective trauma?

A secret carries within something unspeakable, but if I am the bearer of it, should I reveal it? Under which circumstances?

Aline Motta

In Bridges Over the Abyss, Brasilian artist Aline Motta uses a series of strategies in order to build a possible family genealogy over four generations of women. Her search is motivated by her grandmother’s revelation that she had never known her own father. The great-grandfather of the artist was the white, teenage son of her black great-grandmother’s bosses. Spurred on by the revelation of a family secret, Aline set off on a journey looking for traces of her ancestors. She traveled to rural areas in Rio de Janeiro/Brazil, Portugal and Sierra Leone,

Oral history, some documentation, family photo albums and DNA tests recreate Afro-Atlantic kinship ties, in an inverted route of the slave trade. One photograph shows the chief Iman Alhaji Mustapha Koker, of the Mende ethnic group, sitting in pose and elegant attire, while holding proudly a framed photo of his mother, in front of another photo, the artist’s great- grandmother, enlarged and printed in fabric.