by Camryn Loor
Dolor de patria
[Subtitle:] Pain of the motherland
Cuerpo soy yo que mi
[Subtitle:] body I am
orfandad vivo
[Subtitle:] my orphanhood I live
Allá cuando se muere
[Subtitle:] in Cuba when you die
La tierra que nos cubre habla
[Subtitle:] the earth that covers us speaks
Y cubierta de la tierra
[Subtitle:] And covered by the Earth
que me aprisiona
[Subtitle:] that imprisons me
me siento1 al muerto
palpitando2 bajo ella
[Subtitle:] I feel death palpitate beneath her
La tierra anima,
la vida3
the land is alive,
es inmortal cuando
[Subtitle:] the land is immortal when
se acaba
[Subtitle:] it’s over
Y el vivo que se va vivo
[Subtitle:] and the living that is gone
se graba
[Subtitle:] the living is recorded
de la patria inmortal
[Subtitle:] by the immortal motherhood
en la memoria
[Subtitle:] in memory
Más cuando de amor de
[Subtitle:] more when I fill my soul
patria lleno4 mi alma
[Subtitle:] with love of the motherland
ando dejando huellas
[Subtitle:] I’m leaving footprints
en la tierra, andar
[Subtitle:] on the land, to go on
es la victoria”5
[Subtitle:] is victory
(Mendieta qtd. in distrito47)
Ana Mendieta
Ana Mendieta is best described as a woman confused. She was born in 1948 in La Habana, Cuba (Blocker 2). Confused at how her country could fall apart only eleven years after her birth.6 Confused at how she could be taken away from her parents and sent to a different country at twelve, ripped from her mother and her motherland (Blocker 50-51). Confused at how now, living in a small town in Iowa, her identity was now a problem (52-53). Confused at how she found herself in a landlocked state, unable to see the water that both separated her from and connected her to her homeland and her parents. Confused at how she was now an orphan7, minority, exile, spic, gusano, American maybe, Cuban maybe (50-53, 77). Confused at how a friend of hers at the University of Iowa8 could be raped (15), at how the female body could be so destroyed. Confused at who she was, about where she was from, Ana Mendieta turned to art (Blocker 10).
The Silueta Series was one that Mendieta created her entire life.9 Everywhere she went, she tried to find out whether she could fit herself there. Whether she could put her body back in the land. Whether she could ever understand what it meant to feel at home. In several areas in Iowa and in Mexico, she imprinted her body into the ground or she crafted herself from fire or plants or blood (Horsfield et. al 00:19:20-00:21:52, Trotman). She sought place, she sought motherhood, and so she gave birth to herself using elements of the land. She became one with nature, and then she left, and she left her artwork to be consumed by nature. She made herself a missing person—a dead woman, a lack of woman. But in the process of creation, she made herself at home, she felt at one with nature, with her mother, and she unfamiliarized the land to those who had grown comfortable with it, who felt it belonged to them. She draws attention to her point of origin, to the place in the land where she no longer is. And she tells us that the land was meant to be felt, not owned.10
[Mendieta [in Spanish]: Yo trabajo con la tierra, con la naturaleza. Y hago esculturas en el paisaje en el ambiente afuera. Y yo creo que tiene mucho que ver con Cuba, en el sentido de que, a mí me ha traído la naturaleza dónde como no tenía tierra, como no tenía patria . . . .]
[Subtitle: I work with Earth, with nature, and I make sculptures out of landscapes in the environment. I think this has much to do with Cuba, in the sense that I was attracted to nature because I didn’t have a land, a motherland . . . .] (Horsfield et al. 00:01:38-00:02:04)
In 1980, nineteen years after Ana Mendieta had left, she was finally able to return to her motherland (Cabañas 15). Mendieta expected to see ghosts. She expected dead bodies and shattered souls. But she was met with life—human connection flourishing in the wake of disaster (Joya qtd. in Horsfield et. al. 00:30:54-00:31:11). And she felt life too. She felt a deeper connection to her roots, to Santería, to Taíno culture, which are the indigenous people of Cuba (Blocker 18).
She said of the art that she created there: “The works recall prehistoric beliefs of an omnipresent female force whose body parts made the earth a living creature. In essence, my works are the reactivation of primeval beliefs at work within the human psyche” (Mendieta, “A Selection” 323).
Rupestrian Sculptures
In her Rupestrian Series, Mendieta came to the caves of Jaruco, a place Taínos tie to the creation of humanity (Horsfield, et al. 00:28:22-00:30:31, Blocker 18). She honored gods she was told weren’t real because they weren’t white. She defied the American art world who told her that these symbols were too vernacular, uncivilized, of the past, not beautiful. She knew in her soul that this is what felt real, that this is what was beautiful and touching to her. That she had finally found home in her connection to her ancestors, in her connection to femininity. She created an art form that was primitive, that was tied to the first humans, because she saw these people as the most elevated and advanced, rather than the least (Blocker 18-19, Trotman).
“There is no past to redeem. There is the void, the orphanhood, the unbaptized earth of the beginning, the time that, from within, the earth looks upon us. There is above all the search for origin,” she wrote in her artist statements (Mendieta, “A Selection” 323).
Mendieta struggled her whole life for her origin, for her identity on her own terms. She defined herself in the face of exile and oppression not on the terms of her exiler or her oppressor, but on her own terms. Mendieta believed proudly in the culture she was told was barbaric (Blocker 36). She was strongly feminine, intensely feeling over thinking. And from this she created beauty. She is now respected by the same institutions who called her work meaningless, grotesque, [and] primitive (Blocker 2-3, Merewether 90). She believed in the land, she believed in the connection she felt to it, and she showed that this connection is not something trivial, but rather her savior when she most needed it.
She questions nativity, nationality, identity through her very existence. If it can be taken from her, it can be taken from you too. And then what do you rely on when you have no home, when you are ripped from yourself? Who are we when we are no one? she asks. Mendieta teaches us that when all else is gone, what is left is our connection with the land, our connection with each other (Blocker 55-56, 77). Even when separated from her own homeland, she still felt the earth speak to her, she followed her intuition to be near, in, and of the earth. Not because it was rational, but because it was real.
Environmental journalist Willow Defebaugh speaks of her philosophy of “spiritual ecology,” one which, as she says, “weaves together science and spirituality, despite how ingrained it is in many of us that these should be separate” (Defebaugh). Like Mendieta, she knows that this spiritual connection is something real, something unignorable. And she argues that this is how we can repair our world, how we can repair our connection with the land.
The world is on fire, Defebaugh and Mendieta tell us, because we ignore our spiritual connection with her, our oneness with the land, in favor of what we are told is rational thought. The world is on fire because we don’t play our role. If we could believe in an unbaptized earth, in a world before patriarchy and white dominance and power hungriness, we could learn to stop causing pain to our land and to each other.
1 In source: se siente [it feels]
2 In source: palpitar [to feel]
3 In source: (de vida) la vida [(of life) life]
4 In source: llevó [raised]
5 In source: en la victoria [in victory]
6 Editors’ note: In 1959 Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement succeeded in overthrowing the Batista regime in Cuba, after which Mendieta’s father was arrested and imprisoned as an opponent of Communism (Blocker 50-51).
7 Editors’ note: Mendieta’s parents were still alive in Cuba, but she had no family in the US and experienced life in an orphanage and foster care.
8 Editors’ note: Blocker 15 states that Mendieta was responding to “the rape and murder of a female student at the University of Iowa in 1972.” The Tate Modern describes Mendieta’s 1973 photograph Untitled (Rape Scene) and associated performance action as “a response to a brutal and highly publicised rape and murder of a nursing student . . . by another student in March 1973” (Mendieta, Untitled (Rape Scene)).
9 Editors’ note: Although Mendieta utilized her body, silhouettes, and nature throughout her artistic life, the Silueta Series lasted from 1973 to 1980 (“Ana Mendieta: Silueta”).
10 Editors’ note: The interpretive claims in the second half of this paragraph blend observations from various sections of Blocker with the author’s own interpretations.
Works Cited
Blocker, Jane. Where Is Ana Mendieta? : Identity, Performativity, and Exile. Duke University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3007804.
Cabañas, Kaira M. “Ana Mendieta: ‘Pain of Cuba, Body I Am.’” Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 20, no. 1, 1999, pp. 12–17. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/1358840.
Defebaugh, Willow. “An Introduction to the Overview Book.” Atmos, 15 Dec. 2023, atmos.earth/overview-spiritual-ecology-an-introduction.
distrito47. “ANA MENDIETA // TRACES // DEATH OF AN ARTIST // MUERTE DE UNA ARTISTA.” Distrito 47, distrito47.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/ana-mendieta-traces-death-of-an-artist-muerte-de-una-artista. Accessed 20 Apr. 2024.
Horsfield, Kate, et al. Ana Mendieta: Fuego de Tierra. Women Make Movies, 1987.
Mendieta, Ana. “A Selection of Statements and Notes.” A Sulfur Anthology, edited by Clayton Eshleman, Wesleyan University Press, 2016.
Mendieta, Ana. Untitled (Rape Scene). 1973. Tate Modern, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mendieta-untitled-rape-scene-t13355.
Merewether, Charles. “From Inscription to Dissolution: An Essay on Expenditure in the Work of Ana Mendieta.” Ana Mendieta, by Gloria Moure, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea and Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A., 1996.
Trotman, Nat. “Ana Mendieta: Untitled: Silueta Series.” Guggenheim, www.guggenheim.org/artwork/5221.
Audio and Visual Sources
“Ana Mendieta au Jeu de Paume Concorde – Paris.” Youtube, uploaded by Jeu de Paume, 18 Nov. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLDJk2pZQaI&list=PLSj9EqHIUD6fvL1cAXdffQ37b7LbzLMpL&index=39.
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“Ana Mendieta: Silueta Series Photographs.” Galerie Lelong & Co,www.galerielelong.com/viewing-room/ana-mendieta/selected-works.
Bryan-Wilson, Julia. “Against the Body: Interpreting Ana Mendieta.” Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960-1985, edited by Jen Kennedy et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2023, pp. 139-153. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6550936.
Camnitzer, Luis. “Cuban Influences on the 1980s Generation.” New Art of Cuba. University of Texas Press, 1994, pp. 89-99. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/newartofcuba0000camn_w6h9/page/88/mode/2up.
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