Ana Hupe

Interview with Ana Hupe
Juliana Gontijo

Carried out by: Paço das Artes
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Juliana Gontijo: How does Malungas continue the project Readings to move the center?
Ana Hupe: The Readings to Move the Center project came from my relationship with literature, as a way of putting me in the other's shoes. I was in a residence in South Africa when I discovered, in a collection of short stories by African and Afro-descendent writers, a tale by the Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo. The story of the tale takes place in a bus that goes from the southern part of Rio de Janeiro to a "favela" on the outskirts. A maid took fruit she had earned from her mistress for her two young children. A man robs the bus, steals from everyone, but she recognizes him as the father of her youngest son and he does not assault her. When the thief runs away, the people on the bus rape her because they consider her an accomplice. It is a terrible story, like many tales of Evaristo. At that time, I didn't know any black Brazilian writer and I kept thinking about how we are indoctrinated from an European, white and male perspective. As I was in South Africa living an experience of extreme inequality between blacks and whites, this discovery worked as a paradigm break in my social relations. The end of apartheid is very recent, and the constant discussion about decolonization acts there as a collective cure, while here, in Brazil, little is said about the need to free us from the colonial unconsciousness, and racism is something very veiled. Readings to move the center started, then, from my desire to understand who Brazilian black writers are and their literature. I gathered several books published by Africans and Afro-Brazilian descendants from meetings with African immigrants living in Rio de Janeiro, to whom I asked about their relationship with literature and whether this literature was a place to decolonize the body. Many of them brought me books that they believed were representative of the place of their origin, such as those by Cheikh Anta Diop, one of the most recognized writers in Senegal. I began to understand a little more of the literature of each place from these women, but I realized that this topic was difficult to address because most of them did not have a relationship with literature. It's all about orality: the stories are oral, and the conversations we had always went to a place far beyond literature. In Malungas, therefore, I decided to abandon this question, although the project still has a relationship with literature: for each woman I photograph, I construct a non-linear and very open story, based on book clippings. Furthermore, I wanted to work on the issue of Latin American in Europe and not just the immigrant black woman, because I myself live in an itinerancy between Germany, Brazil and several other places. In my life in Germany, there is the eternal presence of marriage as a way to obtain a visa to stay in the country legally and I am always helping with translations or being a witness, it is almost an activism.

JG: Afrofuturism is an aesthetic and conceptual reference for both proposals. How does it act in this context of immigration and decolonization of bodies?
AH: Afrofuturism has always been used as a weapon, as an aesthetic and political strategy of the African diaspora of the United States to become visible and demonstrate its power. This artistic form did not look at history in a linear way, but rather as perpendicular events. Afrofuturism transforms past, present and future into a comet, as if we had only the present time. In Readings to move the center, I played with this idea of the future from a very artificial aesthetic, full of LEDs and Chinese products, but I wanted to work only with black and white in Malungas. Faced with a black and white photograph, we lose a linear notion of space-time, especially if the photograph has the granulation of analogue: it can be as much from 1920 as from 2050. Times mix. I imagined a future in black and white instead of a future in cyber colours. As a reference for the portraits, I used the cartes-des-visits of the German photographer Albert Henschel. He had been hired by the Portuguese Royals in Brazil as an official photographer around 1850, and he used techniques similar to those he used to portray the court to photograph enslaved people in his studio, in an attempt not only to document them, guided by exoticism, but also to exalt them as subjects. I adapted the technique and used a Lomo camera, inspired by the model used at that time, because it was cheaper and easier to obtain. Other old techniques, such as photogramming, for example, allowed me, once again, to explore a temporal anachronism. The process, which dates back to the beginning of photography (approximately 1850), is very slow: for each photo, I had to spend thirty minutes in a dark room. In this project, I actually entered another space-time. I hope, therefore, that the exhibition will bring this temporal confusion.

JG: This relationship between technique, aesthetics and concept also breaks with the idea of technological progress.
AH: Yes, it allows you to build an idea for the future without using digital - despite the videos, of course. To give the impression of the photos floating on the wall, I used only nail, magnet and metal, very simple and totally analogue things. In particular, I'm tired of living in this "digitizing" perception and, therefore, I tried to experience an expanded time in the realization of this project.

JG: What do you call "women of the fourth world"?
AH: For me, immigrant women live on another planet, which I called "the fourth world." It is not a nation, because I want to break that idea of a nation-state. After thinking of that name, I learned that, in anthropology, there is a concept called "3rd zone", for those people who no longer belong to the place where they came from and will never be from the place where they are. It is the immigrant limbo. Currently, it is made up of approximately 65 million people who live outside their place of origin. "Women of the fourth world" has nothing to do with the idea of "countries of the third world".

JG: In talking to these women who make up the project, Latin Americans in Berlin and Africans in São Paulo, you also came across a kind of utopia of immigration, which also goes beyond the past, present and future configurations. How do these projections of the future combine in your work?
AH: This utopia related to immigration is not very new to me, because personally, I lived it years ago, when I spent some time sharing a house with many Brazilian immigrants in London. People would go there imagining jumping into a pool of money, but they would arrive and see that it was much more difficult than they expected, and some even went into prostitution. So, since that time, I have been thinking of immigration as a bankrupt utopia. But, in relation to the Africans who come to Brazil, perhaps immigration is not an utopia. There is no breach of expectations; they find what they expect. My impression is that, as difficult as the issue of employment is, they are grateful to be here and feel at home, because they find a country with a similar climate and a good African heritage. Well, that is what they tell me, but perhaps the reality is something else that they prefer not to expose. Maybe it is a question of cultural difference, and they are just being polite to me, because I am Brazilian. The communication between us has always been difficult, slippery. Immigrant women, both in Brazil and Germany, need space in society. They don't have total control of the social organization system, of the semiotic system or of culture, because they come from another place and have difficulties in finding jobs. If they are given the opportunity, they have much to contribute to a real miscegenation.

JG: In the second part of the project, you show two videos side by side: in the first, Latin Americans in Berlin read and comment on excerpts from the diaries of German scientist Georg Heinrich Langsdorff; in the second, Africans and Afro-descendants in São Paulo read and comment on excerpts from the biography and narrative of former Afro-Brazilian enslaved man Mahommad Gardo Baquaqua. What makes you put, side by side, these two situations of immigration, so diverse? And what is the role of the text in all this?
AH: The text, again, is a starting point for thinking about the condition of immigrant women. Both in the writings of Baquaqua, who was enslaved in Africa and came to Brazil in 1840, and in those of Langsdorff, a German who came here as an explorer in 1815, women did not sit at the table with men and could not participate in discussions. Despite significant changes, these writings from two hundred years ago remain current. The role of women in the society that the chosen passages focus on is still very subdued. Moreover, the relationship between the two immigration flows occurred because I am trying to build a triangulation between Europe, Brazil and contemporary Africa. Our cultural heritage comes from another Africa, not from today's Africa. Nowadays, what we see as precarious, in fact, is a laboratory for the future. From an idea of southern epistemology, there, as here, we find ways of organizing that respond to the world in crisis in a more direct way than the "western" one. I understand that putting Latin American immigrants on the side of African immigrants is risky, since the realities are so disparate. The problems of Latin Americans in Europe seem to be "Luxusprobleme", as the Germans say, compared to those faced by Africans in Brazil. The potency of this choice may lie in suggesting that a visitor to a contemporary art exhibition at the Paço das Artes could also be in this immigration situation. It's a way of bringing life stories together. That is my expectation, but I don't know what the reading will be.

JG: At various times, you relate immigration and work. And to photograph the Latin Americans in Berlin and the Africans in São Paulo, you offered money. Does money come in to simplify a communication relationship between parts or as an indication of capitalization of bodies?
AH: Money is very important in Malungas. When I did Readings to move the centre, I didn't pay for the participation of the women I interviewed; I departed from the idea of talking to people interested in the idea of the project and I wanted to explain all the details to each one. Pre-production was then a long and intense process. However, I faced a difficult situation with two Haitians who had agreed to participate. I went to the City of God, 'favela' in Rio, where they lived. They didn't speak either Portuguese or French. There was a translator from the NGO Viva Rio accompanying me, but the communication, however, was very fragmented. When I asked for permission to use the interview material, they said that they would only authorize it for a fee. And I didn't have any money with me there at the time. Besides, I had this romantic idea of an affective involvement with the project. I told them that I wouldn't use their images, because I wasn't in a position to pay and I didn't want to buy stories either. However, I left there thinking that I should have paid these women. I spent hours in their homes, they are unemployed, and this is a job. If I am using the story of the other, I have to pay for it, even if it is a symbolic amount, which is what the project can pay. In Berlin, it was ten euros; in São Paulo, seventy reais.

The second reason for using the money is that I could not do a previous field research, explain the project individually and thus build a relationship with immigrant women. Therefore, the session of photographs and interviews is offered directly as a job: if you want to, you want to; if you don't want to, you don't want to. It gives more clarity and simplifies. So many women came in the first photo session that I had to shorten the time of work with each one of them, so as not to leave them waiting too long. It was very quick, but that's how it happened: an employment contract. I am therefore quite sure of this decision to pay for the participation of each one.

JG: In relation to this discussion initiated with immigrants, how could the project go beyond a contractual relationship to open a consciousness of decolonization of bodies?
AH: It's hard to answer that question, because a project like this is never enough to decolonize ideas and people. I just hope I've contributed. With some of the women I interviewed, the project went beyond the employment contract; with others, it didn't. In many, the project deconstructed the idea of work they had. There was no longer a specific obligation or task, they just had to tell their stories. Some Angolans, who had already immigrated into the African continent itself and were called Langa because they spoke several languages, understood the project better, so we talked more deeply. They suffered prejudice within their own country and contributed with stories that served to think of the immigration flows and the deconstruction of the immigrant's place as an inferior person.

JG: My previous question is not about thinking of the artist as responsible for "opening the eyes" of a segment of the population that he considers "other", but in the sense of providing, at that moment, a space of self-representation. From what point can this instant of elaboration of an own expression come out of something mechanized to be an act of elaboration of a subjectivity and an own agency of discourses?
AH: Many times, during the interviews, I noticed an authorial discourse, in which they thought of themselves as immigrants. This happened in some moments, but not with all the interviewees, because there was not always a common language and communication was not fluid. I felt that they were happy that they were having some space for expression. I know I have some responsibility for the image of these women, but I don't have any power either. This work is not going to change anyone's life, I am aware of that. I wondered at various times if I was using these women to do a work of art, and what it would bring back to them. However, I think that the organization of the photo session activated a network, in which an older immigrant brought a newcomer, and this may have awakened a collective consciousness that can help their social insertion.

JG: In the deconstruction of colonial discourse, "speaking for the other" and the creation of a scheme of representation became problematic. We are already partially aware of this impossibility of representation, because it is always a discourse of authority. In this sense, it is interesting how, in the third set of works in the exhibition, you are part of the group of immigrants who seek to portray and expose themselves, as in an intimate diary, in the fragile condition of a enslaved body.
AH: I felt the need to approach immigration from a more personal perspective, because it is difficult to speak of African culture not being black and it is in the place of an immigrant that I meet the Africans. In this part of the project you mention, the audio we heard was recorded as in a live radio program, on a 1964 tape recorder: I read a text I wrote about my work experience in the German system, and Manuela Morales, curator and director of Gallery Mario Kreuzberg, where I did the first part of the exhibition in Berlin, asks me questions about the relationship between the use of the body of the immigrant, the slave and the worker. The photograms that accompany the audio use an old photographic technique to speak, also, of this relationship between work and immigration. The aesthetics of survival in Germany put me in the position of taking care of a wheelchair user, and I discovered myself as an extension of her body. In this position in which I was forced not to sketch subjectivity, I had the impression of having my soul separated from the body. This discomfort served as an incentive for this project. As a religion for some, this is how art works for me: it is a kind of mysticism that helps me to sublimate situations and begin to see them in such a way that they have a certain charm.