Ana Hupe takes the slabs, small submerged islands off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, as a starting point for research that feeds this exhibition and that unfolds in her travels around the old continent. The artist embarked on this project to see the city from the outside, from its back, and then take these pictures for a new dive, the water fountains of Berlin, on the other side of the ocean. With echoes of her research on Lampedusa and the boats with hundreds of African immigrants sunken there, Hupe combines territories and stories to talk about the tragic repetition of migratory flows that so many centuries carry men and women in extreme situations. The exhibition features underwater photography, Polaroids, serigraphs and a video that sets the pace of this expedition. The crossing media and the repeated use of images within images - be them photographs of photographs repeatedly dipped and re-photographed in new waters, or speculative images inserted into other landscapes - also speak of endless developments that each image contains and stories that are repeated and combined.

Behind each of these elements, the many stories connected with the crossing of slaves and immigrants glimpse, images and reports submerged with the slabs, insisting on becoming visible when the tide is falling. Rewriting shipwrecked narratives and deprogramming clich`es pictures of the city, Line in between scrutinizes the influence of black Africans in Brazilian culture and the urgent need to bring it to the fore as we still have numbers of people throwing themselves overboard into the unknown. Hupe proposes a dip in these murky waters, sinking borders, to write imaginary lines and new horizons that connect the visible and the invisible, the center and the periphery, the other, the between.


Pictures of the exhibition by Byron Prujansky / FotoRio