Ana Hupe

Having graduated in journalism and holding a PhD in visual arts from UFRJ, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Ana Hupe (Rio de Janeiro, 1983) is a multifaceted artist who works with artistic research, counter-archives, narrative installations, engravings, video, and other media. In this interview, Hupe takes us through the encounters, events, and stories that have shaped her artistic journey and tells us how she extends her research to find the materiality of these stories. Check it out:

Ana, thank you for being with us. It’s a pleasure to talk to you. Let’s start with a brief introduction about you, including any information you think might be relevant to someone who doesn’t know about your practice and your art.

It starts with a challenge (laughs). It seems like a simple question, but it isn’t easy to summarize your biography. To begin with, I didn’t study art, I studied journalism. I wanted to work with text ever since I started university. However, during college, I began working in cinema so that I could work and study in Rio at the same time. I worked as an assistant director and started making institutional and commercial scripts. I realized that everything was very brief and there wasn’t much room for creative elaboration, which I wanted to do when writing and even though I liked investigative journalism, which is still present in my work today. When I finished university, in the early 2000s, I was twenty-two and decided to try living in Berlin. I had already lived in Germany when I was fifteen, when I did an exchange program in a small town near Stuttgart. I was enchanted by the mystery of what was so different to me. It was a painful experience for a teenager from Rio de Janeiro who was discovering life to suddenly arrive during the winter in a small town in Germany, where life was different. It was a tough difference, but I was the one who chose to go through it, and, after this initial experience, I came to like it. We also learn from suffering. When I passed through Berlin for the first time, I thought, “I think I could live here”, and kept that spark in my mind. When I finished university, I came with one of my sisters, who’s five years younger than me, and she had finished school and wanted to study in Germany. As she didn’t have any money, we took advantage of the fact that I did, and so went there together. If I tell you the details of the whole story in this way it seems like everything is fluid, so I’ll summarize it here so as not to make the story too long. I lived in Berlin for a year and a half between 2006 and 2007. It was a challenging experience. Although I’d already worked in film, people only offered me unpaid internships because I was too young by local labor standards. I started working in bars and did so many unimaginable jobs. I wasn’t happy. Things were so visibly off-track that I was once called for an interview, which I’d applied for through the newspaper classifieds, to work with an Iranian film director. I got there super excited until I discovered that the director was blind. Today, I think it could have been an incredible experience, but at that moment I was speechless. I wanted to continue working with things I liked. I lived in Berlin with Alice Miceli, an artist from Rio, who was there to carry out a research project in the restricted area of Chernobyl. Alice wanted to reveal the radioactivity in the air through photography, so she developed a lead camera to photograph the invisible. I followed her process, and, for me, it was an introduction to the grammar of contemporary art, where each artist finds their vocabulary. Inspired by Alice, I returned to Rio and started taking a course with the tutor Charles Watson. It was a good, immersive introduction, but the question of how to be an artist without being an heiress was taking up more and more space. I got a job at the Roberto Marinho Foundation while studying for my master’s degree.

When you decided to do this course, had you already decided to become an artist, or were you experimenting and wanting to see what would happen?

I was experimenting. I started with video, and with little knowledge of cinema and TV. I didn’t know what my language would be, but I knew that I liked writing, and that I was between cinema and writing. In Brazil, I started studying hard for this master’s because I recognized it would be a chance to do what I love. I worked so hard that I came first in the master’s program at UERJ. At the time, the only scholarship guaranteed by FAPERJ was for first place – the other scholarships were from CAPES. I did my master’s with the poet, Roberto Correia dos Santos, who reconnected me with text. I then began to develop my first works that are still with me today, for example, the work I did at the end of my master’s degree for a tattoo on my back.

É um texto que escrevi, tirei as palavras e deixei só as pausas como forma de manter o texto sempre atualizado, de ficar sempre aberto. E resolvi fazer a tatuagem simbolizando um casamento que estava fazendo com as artes e um compromisso comigo mesma.

(Translation: It’s a text I wrote, after which I deleted the words to leave only the pauses (commas, full stops) and keep the text current, and open. I decided to get the tattoo to symbolize a marriage I made with the arts, a commitment to myself). From then on, I started experimenting with the city’s alphabet, writing without words, always trying to bring text into the space. It was during my master’s that I managed to format these ideas. At that time, I was very influenced by Sophie Calle in carrying out actions and then writing about them. That’s when I visited various strangers in their homes and took their photographic portraits. Then I made a diary, and an installation. They were very experimental works of writing -performance.

Ana, during your research and life as an artist, what were the main challenges you experienced throughout your career that you would like to share?

Nothing has been easy. I’ve thought about giving up many times, but now, maturity brings a little more understanding regarding the limits of where I can invest my energy. I’ve gone way beyond my limits because of art. Big projects like “Readings to Move the Centre (2016)” at the CCBB, and “Women of the Fourth World”, which I did in Berlin and at Paço das Artes (MIS) in São Paulo, were large exhibitions with a lot of visibility, but made with few financial resources and requiring a lot of travel. They were moments of the impossible, conceiving these projects without any financial support. I didn’t even have a house at the time; I was a “nomad,” jumping from branch to branch. It was total surrender. I think the exhibition entitled “Muito Futuro por Uma Só Memória,” in 2017 at the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation, was my biggest challenge then. I went to the Brazilian outback in search of the story of a woman called Dé (Maria Francisca da Conceição), who raised my mother but had no legal documentation or civil registration. Her identity was established after working for my great-grandmother; we didn’t know exactly where she came from, just what she had told us. I recapped the story with my great-aunt, who lives in Recife and is now 100 years old, though at the time of the interview she was ninety-four. I went to the outback to try to understand where Maria Francisca da Conceição came from, where she was born, and what her story would have been before she arrived at my great-grandmother’s house – who lived in the Zona da Mata – asking for work. She finally became part of the family. There’s this ambiguous, very colonial Brazilian thing, especially in the northeast, of being part of the family, but not really. Everyone thinks she was – of course she was – but she lived in the maid’s room. She never had a life of her own, never had a boyfriend, a family, or told anyone about her past. These stories are part of my mum’s childhood; she always mentions her. I was intrigued to think about the traumas this woman must have suffered. That sparked the project, which is about her story, and the story of so many Marias. I visited the town where she was born, São José do Belmonte, which used to be made up of two large farms. On the first farm, Malhada Grande, all the workers were called “Conceição”, referring to the farm owner’s name and which was a vestige of slavery. It’s possible that she ran away from this farm. I talked to the older black people in town – the oldest lady I met, coincidentally or not, was Margarida Maria da Conceição. I also visited the quilombos [settlements made by former slaves and their descendants] near there. I discovered a quilombo called Conceição das Criolas, created in the 19th century by seven women who, like Maria Francisca, were called da Conceição. I unraveled the possible history of Maria Francisca’s past, filling in some of the gaps in her story with evidence. It was a research project with many layers. I had to put together a large exhibition with few resources and only a little time, which made it very challenging, not to mention the tightrope walk of pointing out and confronting Brazilian apartheid in the family’s history. I remember that everything was still under construction the day before the exhibition. There was smoke in the exhibition space, ladders in the middle of the room, and real chaos the day before the opening. I had to run out to buy a light bulb in the city, and I remember that I started to get a migraine-like headache for the first time, and, whenever I’m stressed now, the pain comes back in the same place. At that moment a screw came loose, and a kind of antenna called ‘burnout’ was born. It’s a lot to give in these big exhibitions, and I did wonder if I got back what I put in. I don’t want to tear myself in pieces to make an exhibition; it doesn’t make sense. Since then, I’ve been thinking daily about ways to work more healthily, and writing gives me a little of that possibility.

Tell us about your techniques and the materials you use. How does this collection of material work in your case, and how does it transform into your work?

Eu não sou muito baseada em materialidade, eu trabalho com histórias. Em cada trabalho eu penso em como formatar de um jeito que eu fale a mesma coisa através da matéria, no espaço. Como que eu conto essa história sem contar. Esse que é o desafio sempre.

(Translation: I’m not based in materiality; I work with stories. I think about how to format each work so I can say the same thing through matter in space. How do I tell this story without telling it? That’s always the challenge.). OPAVIVARÁ, an art collective in Rio where I spent five years, and which was my biggest art school, taught me about the power of encounters. The idea of relational art consists entirely of talking and putting people who wouldn’t otherwise meet in contact with each other, such as sitting the city’s Culture Secretary at a table with a homeless person. This happened in one of the interventions we did in a public space. We made a kitchen in Praça Tiradentes (RJ), which people without housing occupied, alongside people from the arts. It was the first time I talked to homeless people, in a certain temporary level playing field, cutting onions, seeing them, and listening to their stories. That’s what stayed with me from the collective, apart from the friendships that became like family. At a certain point, everything became too intense, too enjoyable, and so much physical labor for each production! In 2013, I decided it was time to leave and get back to myself, and to concentrate on me. Moving to Germany in 2014 was a turning point, as I changed countries and continents and my focus at work. I came to do a year’s sandwich doctorate, and the geopolitical inequalities started screaming at me. I made this change when I was thirty-one. I already had a certain amount of experience with life and art in Brazil, and an understanding of social and cultural constructions. When I arrived, I realized that people read me as Latin American, though I didn’t think much about where I came from. The idea of a geopolitical border became a direct issue in my life. In 2014 and 2015, it was the time of the refugee crisis, which had arrived in Lampedusa via the Mediterranean.

For you, what was the main difference between Rio and Berlin?

In Rio, OPAVIVARÁ’s work has always been very political. We were always very attentive to issues of inequality, about where we were circulating and placing our work, how we formatted it for a commercial, institutional art space, or a public space, and how to deal with the people who were part of the work and were in vulnerable situations. When I arrived here alone, it was a confrontation with these huge numbers of refugees in the newspaper. In 2013, there was a sit-down protest at Oranienplatz, in Kreuzberg, and I lived right next door. I was a newcomer and didn’t understand the political crisis, but the huge numbers in the newspaper took me to the island of Lampedusa to find out what was happening. It’s a tiny, touristy island, closer to Africa than Europe. I arrived in February and stayed for a fortnight. It was crazy because, during that time, 1,200 migrants arrived by boat and came in through the harbor, and I didn’t see a single one. I was in the bakery next to the harbor where the boats arrived. There was a television on, and the news said these people had arrived the night before, right next to me, and I hadn’t seen a thing. These people go straight to a refugee camp, practically hidden away. It’s an island that lives off tourism and fishing, so nobody wants to discuss it. I’d ask people, “Where is the camp? where are the people who arrive by boat?” and nobody wanted to tell me. One said, “Oh, on top of the mountain”. Another said, “Oh, it’s down in the valley”. The island is very small; I could cycle around it in a day and still I couldn’t find out where this camp was. I started thinking about these invisibilities and how to shape them. It wasn’t just the invisibility of these people but also various things happening on that island where five thousand inhabitants lived. There was super-strong electromagnetism in the air due to the radars of an American military base, which later became an Italian military base, in ’94. I started thinking about all these invisibilities then, and my work in Lampedusa – Blurred Borders – was about that. I sent fifty-five anonymous postcards with pictures of the island on, back to the island, to all sorts of places: hotels, supermarkets, and the house where I had stayed. I also sent poetic-political messages in bottles about illegal immigration from the borders, and issues present at that time for me, a newcomer to Europe. This was the first work I did after arriving in Berlin. I was in Hito Steyerl’s class, where there was a lot of discussion about the internet’s invisible controls. I kept thinking about the optical fibers at the bottom of the sea, connecting worlds, crossing borders that are so well-mapped but invisible in the landscape. The internet is not immaterial; we have these optical fibers running under the ocean, which is also disputed territory. It wasn’t just these invisibilities of bodies, but so many invisibilities that appear immaterial, and which control our bodies. I decide which material to use and how best to translate it into each work. Although I work with artistic research, I find super-academic exhibitions very boring, where there’s a table with lots of files, documents, and a documentary video explaining them. It’s almost an opening up of the artist’s research process. I do a lot of research from archives, documents, reading and teaching. Still, when formatting the work for the space, I like a format that is minimally open to other meanings.

Que a pessoa se confronte com aquilo, que tenha uma bula, uma espécie de texto introdutório, um footnote (nota de rodapé), mas a pessoa ainda pode olhar o labirinto de cobre com uma pedrinha no meio e imaginar outras coisas e transportar para a própria vida. Ler isso no plano sensível, não só do racional. Isso, para mim é uma coisa importante, uma questão que está presente. 

(Translation: When the person is brought in front of it, there is a leaflet, a kind of introductory text, a footnote. However, the person can still look at the copper labyrinth with a pebble in the middle, imagine other things, and transport it to their own life. Read it on a sensitive level, not just a rational one. That is an important thing, a question that is present). This labyrinth worked for me a bit like a summary of the Footnotes to the Triangular Cartographies project, when I went to the Sacred Forest of Oxum-Oxobô, where the river Oxum starts, where this orixá [a helpful spirit derived from Yoruba culture] so popular in Brazil and Nigeria, is the river itself. I found a book in a bookshop in Ejigbo that taught Yoruba to children, but it didn’t have any words. I was looking at these little games to teach a language, and there was a labyrinth with a chicken and, in the center of it, a piece of corn. I said, “This labyrinth is perfect as a metaphor for this investigation”, and I made the labyrinth out of copper, which is the element found in Oxum, and put the river pebble in the middle. It’s related to this search for the origins of so many African cultures forcibly transported across the Atlantic, which have greatly influenced Brazilian, Cuban, and Haitian cultures. Perhaps this is an example of how to materialize stories.

This plurality of techniques and media that tell the same story, or parts of a story together, is interesting. You use this freedom to take stories and translate them in different ways, illustrating these stories not only in a single work, but in a group of works represented in different ways – as in footnotes, for example – but also in individual pieces.

I work in the form of installation, and I make installations that, for me, have several narratives that form a narrative. I always think about storytelling and make narrative installations because I’m telling a story. Maybe the person doesn’t read the story I want to tell – they read another one – but I’m proposing a narrative through a mixture of objects, attempts at sculpture, photography, or images that come from the archive rather than directly from the photographs I take. I used to anchor myself in the video as the context for the installation, which reveals what I’m not showing directly, but now I’m more interested in writing. I loved making the book “Footnotes for Triangular Cartographies” (from the Processing Process series by K Verlag, Berlin). The language I’m most familiar with is writing. It’s where I get the most satisfaction and the most pleasure. I ran away from words for so long, trying to transform hem and bring them into space, and now I want to get back to the page.

How was the process of transforming this set of works into a book?

When I made the exhibition “Footnotes for Triangular Cartographies,” I noticed that the installation and the works were present, but every time I took people, I liked to tell the stories of the footnotes of each work, which I thought were much cooler than the works themselves. I decided I needed to make a book that could tell these stories much better than the exhibition alone. It’s a process book. While it tells the process of building the work, it shows the details that give an idea of what the work is. That was the idea behind the book: to bring forward these narrated stories behind the research, but which are, at the same time, the work itself.

The book allows you to access the works more easily as a reader. While exhibitions often have an immediate feel, books allow you to digest and understand the work over a longer period.

And because there’s so much history, it’s hard to get everything.

Eu acho essa memória do corpo no espaço super importante, é o que ainda me atrai nas artes visuais, porque você passa e, aquilo fica com você. É uma experiência do corpo, é diferente só da experiência racional da leitura. Mas, ao mesmo tempo, o livro circula, e pode vir a fazer sentido na vida de alguém daqui a cinco anos, é um objeto que fica.

(Translation: This memory of the body in a space is super important; it still attracts me to the visual arts because you pass by something, and it stays with you. It’s a bodily experience, different from the rational experience of reading. At the same time, the book circulates, which might then make sense in someone’s life five years later; it’s an object that stays). The exhibition is short-lived, and the book you read in your own time, wherever you want, and at other times in your life you may go to it again.

In the book, you show that unusual encounters are not as surprising as they seem. Like, for example, the connection between the Iemanjá [a sea goddess] of Brazil and that of Africa, as well as its relationship with the moon Europa. Tell us a bit about how you find these connections.

Eu chamo de poética da sincronicidade. É um exercício de ver poesia no dia a dia mesmo, que na verdade, já era um exercício meu como artista, enxergar além do que está se revelando racionalmente, e entender que era para ser, e não é algo trivial, está acontecendo por um motivo.

(Translation: I call it the poetics of synchronicity. It’s an exercise in seeing poetry in everyday life, which was an exercise of mine as an artist to see beyond what is being revealed rationally, and to understand that it was meant to be, and which is not trivial; it’s happening for a reason). It’s a natural part of my development, my way of seeing the world, which I practice, improve, and perfect each time. It’s about getting closer to intuition. We’re so ruled by rationalism that it’s become a counter-systemic exercise for me to get closer to intuition. While writing, I talked to people in Nigeria and worked for two years doing video conferences with Jumoke Sanwo, an artist from Lagos. I showed her texts that worked with the idea of the poetics of synchronicity, and I realized that synchronicity is part of Yoruba philosophy and Candomblé; searching for meanings, having a revealing dream that becomes a pathfinder, paying attention to what the oracle says, the sequence of numbers, colors, people, and encounters – in short, seeing the sacred, or the poetry, in things. What I thought was art is also Yoruba sacredness. I began to work more consciously with this aesthetic of synchronicity, which is the book’s main theme, and project. The project began to take shape when I met Babá Joaquín, a Cuban Oxum [a river Goddess, derived from Yoruba culture] priest who has lived in Berlin for forty years. We met at a party at his place of worship in Berlin, where he was dressed completely in marvellous Oxum yellow. In 2018, I received a grant to do a residency in Cuba (from ArtRio), and I invited Babá Joaquín to have coffee with me. We met, and I started the conversation by discussing my experience at the residency in Bahia. I lived for two months alongside an Oxum princess who was also a priestess and came from Osogbo. He looked at me and asked, “What’s her name?” I replied, “It’s Adedoyin Olosun.” Surprised, he said, “She proposed to me in ’89.” So, I had met a Cuban Babá in Berlin, and then we discovered that we had this person in common in Nigeria. He had only been to Africa once, at the Oxum festival in 1989. They were both in their twenties, and she had asked him to marry her. At that moment, I said: “This is not a coincidence, it’s not a trivial thing”. For me, it was a confirmation that I had to continue this project and I need to tell these stories that I hold. We went to his house straight after coffee to look at the photos. There’s even a photo in their book from 1989, at the Oxum Festival. I call the two of them my guiding stars. There was a lot of magic along the way. I was in a second-hand bookshop in Salvador – that’s how the book ends – where a friend took me; I was already finishing the book at that point, in December 2021. The bookshop was called O Xangô de Xangai and was in a commercial building. I was fingering the books on the shelves when I picked up a book by Abdias Nascimento, “Against Racism.” I opened the first page and saw a written dedication from Abdias himself, from 1983 – the year I was born – which read “To Mother Menininha, with Axé and Oxum’s Blessing.” This blessing triangulates throughout Abdias Nascimento’s book, to the end of the book, and continues these powerful encounters. I even scanned the page because the bookseller didn’t even know it had this dedication. He said, “This is a treasure!” Sometimes we get carried away by this poetics, seeing signs in everything, but some of these signs can be interesting. In this project, I made my perspective very clear. I wasn’t a Candomblé follower. I’m referring to a culture that is not directly mine. However, it is a popular culture that is very present in Brazil. I was always very careful, especially at the beginning of the research, to figure out how to write this as an outsider. I witnessed a lot of historical encounters and thought, “I need to write about this”. I met Adedoyin, the priestess directly descended from Oxum, in Bahia, Brazil, and she took me to the most traditional Candomblé houses, to the oldest places of worship. I visited Casa Branca, Brazil’s first registered place of worship, dating back to 1831, and Opô Afonjá and Gantois, and all these meetings were private. I was able to see the families of each house with her. It was common for people to ask about, and try to connect with, contemporary Africa, since Brazil’s relations with the African coast are two hundred, or one hundred and fifty, years old. People were curious to understand the differences and similarities with the present, and where distance had come about. The source is the same, and I witnessed encounters that made me think: “This is history. It’s not just a detail, it’s a relevant fact that should be documented and written down”. I received these confirmations all the time. I knew I had to accept them and immerse myself in these stories because I had this responsibility in my hands.

Interview conducted on 13 April 2023 remotely via Zoom.

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