The exhibition 'A lot of future for one single memory' is the result of research carried out by Ana Hupe within the framework of the Artistic Residencies Program of Joaquim Nabuco Foundation. The show brings together, in different ways, enough elements to suggest a narrative that is not known for sure if it is entirely true or if it is an invented part. It articulates images and texts in a way that exactly erases the boundaries between what was supposedly lived by someone and what can be fictional. Not by little trouble in the investigation done or by small attachment to the reconstitution of facts. But for inscribing itself in a tradition of art and history that considers the past a construction of the time of now, which exists less as something to be unveiled and more as a chain of events and people thought as possible from what is known at each time and place.

The centre of the exhibition is Maria Francisca da Conceição, a black woman who worked in the artist’s great-grandmother’s home in the interior of Pernambuco for several decades. Determined to tell a plausible story to someone who has had a life squeezed between ostensible physical presence and almost complete social invisibility, Ana Hupe travels through different cities and times, tying the narrative threads she finds and simultaneously opening herself to unanticipated possibilities. Drawing on procedures that approximate and confuse scientific research and creative locution, it weaves and exposes, in its own way, a historiographic panel of a country that maintains, as a persistent mark of its construction, abysmal levels of inequality - condition and result of ingrained prejudices of race, gender and class.

‘A lot of future for a single memory’ proposes, from its title and in the combination of its parts, to be plausible, from traces and signs of a woman who spent her life almost without being noticed and with her past kept in secret, to seek indications of many other experiences resembled by being dispossessed of the right to tread and narrate their lives with autonomy. Elements of exclusion that approach blacks and Indigenous since the European invention of Brazil but also pave, in counterpoint, possibilities of current resistance to this condition. The artist bets on the ability of each visitor to imagine, in the encounter between the traces and the voices exposed and the memories and repertoires they carry, a future of the country in which Maria Francisca could be a counted person.

Moacir dos Anjos

During the exhibition, there was a crowdfunding campaign created after meeting Lourdinha, the president of the Quilombola Association of Conceição das Crioulas, to buld a waterwell in her land. The amount of 3000 Brazilian Reais was achieved in one month and she sent me two videos of the water finally arriving in her plantation.

Here is the link to the online campaign:
https://www.catarse.me/agua_para_rocar?ref=project_link