On Ana Mendieta, belonging, and art-making
What I really want to start with is being honest about the crippling self-doubt I’ve experienced prior to writing this piece. Frankly, I’ve felt this way in parts all year. And feeling like an imposter has a really tricky way of making its way into activities you love - like writing, art-making, teaching - and it can be quite debilitating. I stumbled upon this lovely Brain Pickings article that I really resonated with, and thanks to Fariha Róisín’s timely newsletter On Care I now have a little bit of courage to put into words some of my thoughts without constant self-judgment. As my dear friend Mika says (and prior to her my professor Lindsey) “You can’t critique the work while you make it”. So here is my attempt at sharing with you my thoughts on art, in the hope that you may resonate with a sentence, a paragraph, or perhaps the piece.
I was first introduced to Ana Mendieta’s work in graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016; and I’ve felt a turbulent tug to her work at different times in my life ever since. Upon meeting this work I felt an overflow of emotion - of feeling held, of feeling seen, feeling arrested by the body, the landscape - and the impermanence of both. What it is that draws me to her work, (apart from the obvious connections I perceive between her work and mine) is a constant discovery mediated by time and my maturity.
Ana Mendieta was an American-Cuban performance artist living a life in exile in the United States of America. Most famously known for her ‘earth-body’ works, Mendieta occupied a very important space as a feminist artist in the 70s whose work transcended the boundaries of political, economic, and social issues. What began as an explorative project during her time as a student at the University of Iowa, became a heavily researched, career-defining body of work for Mendieta. The Siluetas (silhouette) series is the work that has had the most significant impact on me.
Mendieta’s Siluetas exists as over 200 body-art sculptures as photographs and videos. The site-specific nature of these sculptures creates a space for powerful discourse around Latin hybridity and one’s experiences around an individual’s space in “non-identity”. Using the earth and its raw materials as tools to create her work, she utilizes these elements to represent her dislocation in relation to the land. Either literally or figuratively.
How can we define what a silhouette is? An outline, a shadow, a contour? The dictionary definition is “the outline of a body circumscribing a mass”. How beautiful a word is circumscribing? - one that describes another.
Her work is restricted within a specific geographical context, only present in a defined space and time. The siluetas poignantly play with the absence and presence of the body. Sometimes the body is seen buried on the earth’s crusty surface - amongst blades of grass, in a bed of flowers, stacked rocks on her heavily breathing body; And sometimes, the absence of it - a cotton fabric outline of the body lit on fire, as drawings on leaves, sometimes carved onto semi-circular wood panels and sculptured stems. Some of them are distinct, with the position of the hands placed alongside the head, while some are more obscure, a faint figure disappearing between a lush green landscape or soft mud slowly becoming one with the ocean.
In Silueta Sangrienta (a 1:51 min silent film), her body is seen facing upwards on the surface of the mud, over time, the body disappears and we’re left to see the cavity it has left behind. It is then filled with red paint/pigment, insinuating blood. And lastly, facing downwards - being united with the earth and the blood. In her words “it is a return to the maternal source”. By using “blood” as a metaphor, she forges a physical connection with her naked body and the earth, attempting to address the painful separation from Cuba, yet temporarily reconnecting to the land and the womb.
The evolution of Mendieta’s siluetas can be seen as her growth in her understanding of the Cuban culture and her complex identity. Her silhouettes in the early 80s borrowed from the mythical representation of pre-Colombian religions like Santería and Taíno. Guabancex (Goddess of the Wind), Maroya (Goddess of the Moon), and Bacayu (Light of the Day) - the titles of her earth-body works are some examples of how the silhouettes continued to represent the female form in relation to nature. The gendered silhouettes inherently bring into question the politics and labels associated with the body occupying the space. They highlight the “otherness” of the female body in exile. To quote Mariana Ortega, “the space of in-betweenness is the imagined land of belonging”.
In other words, I find the concept of impermanence, in-betweenness, and the dichotomies of presence and absence as recurring themes in Siluetas. It highlights the juxtaposition between merely existing and actually living through the silent transition of the presence and absence of the body and its traumas, the contained blood, and the silhouette.
I love that a work of art so ephemeral has such a lasting effect because I have never seen her work in person. They exist as evidence in the form of stills or photographs. While in reality, they have disappeared in the landscape of time, materiality, and with her death, her body as well. To me, the work is powerful because of its temporality, and I am deeply moved by the belief that the artist, in performing so, reconciles with her pain and is attempting to let go of it by literally allowing the earthwork to disappear in the landscape.
After an emotionally exhausting experience of applying for the O1 visa in 2019, I felt vulnerable and empty at the end of the process. I felt dehumanized and alone in my struggle. I wanted nothing more than to be home and closer to my friends and family. It felt like I was up against the pillars and structures of immigration, the foundation of which opposed the very nature of movement and freedom that I deeply value. A week after I got the visa, I tore my ACL. And with it began an arduous process of accepting my prognosis, having surgery, and beginning the long rehabilitation journey. I’ve since moved home to Bangalore and have been working towards a painful and challenging process of returning to my ‘self’. In this process, I’ve found Mendieta’s work to be very meaningful. Of realizing and living in my own body, of finding refuge, feeling my anger, isolation, and moving through the pain.
And in that to me lies the universality of her work.
Additional Readings
Tate Museum, “Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico)”, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mendieta-untitled-silueta-series-mexico-t13357
Stacy E. Schultz, “Latina Identity: Reconciling Ritual, Culture, and Belonging”. Woman's Art Journal. Vol. 29, No. 1. (Spring-Summer, 2008).
Mariana Ortega. “Exiled space, in-between space: existential spatiality in Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas Series”. Philosophy & Geography, Vol. 7, No. 1. February 2004
Laura Roulet, “Ana Mendieta as Cultural Connector with Cuba”, American Art, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 2012)
"In Silueta Sangrienta (a 1:51 min silent film), her body is seen facing upwards on the surface of the mud, over time, the body disappears and we’re left to see the cavity it has left behind. It is then filled with red paint/pigment, insinuating blood." Beautiful!