"Through a kind of neutralization, she succeeds in making the work and the body universal."
In 1973, I created my first work on an Aztec tomb overgrown with weeds and grasses – this overgrowth reminded me of that time. I bought white flowers at the market, lay down on the grave and let them cover me. It was as if time and history were spreading over me. – Ana Mendieta
The Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, in cooperation with the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota, is showing the exhibition Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta from April 20 to July 22, 2018. The exhibition includes a selection of 23 films from the artist’s multifaceted oeuvre, which was recently processed and digitized in a multi-year research project. We spoke to Stephanie Rosenthal, art historian and director of the Martin-Gropius-Bau, about the work of the Cuban-American artist.
Why did you and the Gropius Bau decide to exhibit Ana Mendieta’s art?
Ana Mendieta is a very important artist for me – and always has been. In 2014, I was already responsible for a Mendieta show at the Hayward Gallery in London and learned at the time that the process of digitizing her films had begun. I was already toying with the idea of bringing her art to Germany.
Ana Mendieta works with the body, but also with nature and land. For us at the Gropius Bau, these are themes that are also relevant for upcoming exhibitions: Land in the sense of landscape and nature, border in the sense of separation, division and wall. This is particularly exciting in relation to the location of the Gropius Bau. During the division of the city, the building was located on the West Berlin side directly next to the Berlin Wall. In a place so steeped in history, questions of belonging and identity always arise. Mendieta addresses such questions in her work.
What are the main characteristics of her art?
There is something very contemporary and contemporary about her works. She documented her performances – and sees documentation as the real art and the central work. This is also very important for today’s artists. In general, Ana Mendieta has a certain timelessness. Timeless in the sense that she does not stand for herself, but for humanity. She manages to make us look at her naked female body objectively in her performances. Through a kind of neutralization, she succeeds in making her work and body universally valid. Her works from the 1970s and 80s are therefore still relevant today, 40 years later. They offer very decisive poetic and political, very strong statements – especially in times of refugee movements and migration, which are all about home and belonging.
What background does Mendieta have that is evident in her work?
Ana Mendieta came from Cuba and emigrated to America as a teenager. Her father was politically active and opposed Fidel Castro’s policies. When Castro came to power, the USA carried out a campaign called “Peter Pan”: Children from Cuba were brought to America because it was believed that they would have a hard time in Havana for political reasons. So young Ana Mendieta came to Iowa, left her Cuban family and grew up as a foster child, together with her sister, in homes and foster families.
“Wherever you are, you can connect with the land and soil”
Certainly a tough time for her, which left a lasting impression on her …
Yes, she was suddenly a foreigner with a different skin color and hardly spoke any English. That’s why her works read like a kind of reconnection: she reconnects herself with nature by lying on the ground and working with elements such as fire, smoke and pigments. It is always about reconnecting with nature, but not necessarily with Cuban nature, but with the nature in which she finds herself. As a result, she offers a very positive view: Wherever you are, you can connect with the land and soil.
It combines different disciplines such as body art, performance art and land art. The connecting element is the dialog with nature. What does this dialog look like?
Dialogue means exposing yourself to nature. In one of her works from Mexico, she covered her body with medium-sized STEIN. The viewer sees a visually strong breathing movement under these stones. It almost feels as if nature is breathing through the artist. Only the head and the stones can be seen moving up and down. Nature seems to have come to life. In another work, Mendieta adorns herself with feathers and goes swimming in the sea, causing her feathered garment to slowly dissolve. In the work “Greec”, she stands in a river and smears herself with red paint, thereby thematizing the life cycle and the goddess of fertility. She does all this in and with nature. Ana Mendieta was an artist who played a lot with spiritual-ritual elements.
What does that mean?
She dealt intensively with Santería, a syncretic, main Afro-American religion in Cuba. She certainly took some elements from it. There are works in which she uses blood. That had something powerful and magical for her. In “Chicken Piece”, she shows a chicken being decapitated and sacrificed. In other works, she applies a liquid to her own silhouette and lets it burn. However, she would certainly not say that the works relate only to Santería rituals, but rather that they are a mixture of different interests and influences from books – and from these she developed her own rituals.
What role do nature and the body play in Mendieta’s work?
For her, the connection between the two is certainly crucial. The preoccupation with nature, soil and ground is connected to identity and the search for identity, to the question “Where do I belong?”. The (female) body, both then and now, is always under the scrutiny of society and subject to its role expectations. This goes hand in hand with different forms of discrimination. Ana Mendieta wants to express otherness and the body – what we are in, our shell – is the most suitable means of doing so.
Through her work, she crosses many borders, including geographical and political spaces. Can you explain this in more detail?
In a metaphorical sense, she connects with her own country, Cuba, through her work and by reconnecting with nature. Her statement is: even from afar, at a distance from home, you can connect with it. This implies a clear political statement and the associated question “Who owns what?”. It makes it clear: No matter where you are, it belongs to you, just as it belongs to everyone else. In doing so, it also undermines the question of nationality and says instead: Nature belongs to all of us. Wherever I am, I occupy the land. This is a very reduced, calm way of making a strong statement.
“The work disappears and at the same time remains inscribed forever”
Your works in nature change involuntarily with the passage of time …
That’s how it is. In the mid-1970s, Mendieta’s own body disappears from the works; she is no longer part of them, but works with her own silhouette. She recreates structural forms that correspond to the size of her own body. She creates forms in and out of sand, which she places on the edge of the sea, for example, so that the silhouette is washed out and washed away by the water over the course of the day. The work disappears and at the same time remains inscribed forever – through memory and ultimately through the medium of film.
