The Brooklyn Rail

Two figures lie next to each other, faces close together, knees pulled toward their chests, shallow water lapping against their silhouetted bodies. This seems to be a watery grave, with an elegy written by seagulls calling out to each other and waves glittering in the sunlight. We realize, then, that no, these are not bodies, but shapes made from mounds of sand, mirroring one another as they slowly disappear into the sea. This vision—the scene, the shapes, the sound—was captured by artist Ana Mendieta in her film Ochún (1981), one of her first pictures to include sound and, inevitably, the last that she would produce. Filmed in Key Biscayne, Florida, facing out into the Atlantic, only a small stretch of ocean separated Ana Mendieta in that moment from her homeland of Cuba, which she left at age twelve. She would spend her career trying to reconcile the violence of this separation.

Ana Mendieta would—should—have turned seventy-five this month, if she had not fallen from a window in New York’s East Village on September 8, 1985. Did she jump or was she pushed? Laughably, this question is still considered to be under debate, and perhaps always will be; at the time, her husband and fellow artist Carl Andre was acquitted of second degree murder, and the controversy of her death would soon overshadow her career. You won’t find the work of Ana Mendieta neatly organized into a collection on The Criterion Channel, nor will you find the breadth of her oeuvre remastered on a Blu-ray disc with a shiny, carefully designed cover. The films which she produced over the course of her career—over one hundred, most of which were only a few minutes long, the length of a single spool of 35mm film—are not available to the broad swaths of the public who consume media online. This is, perhaps, by design. Ana Mendieta’s work resisted the conformity necessary for acceptance into prestigious, established institutions. Even some contemporary art movements of the 1970s rejected performance art in favor of more traditional painting and sculpture; the ephemerality of performance naturally defied attempts at commodification.

Though phonetically suggesting the word “ocean,” the film title Ochún refers to Oshun, a river deity within Santéria, a religion resulting from the complicated combination of diasporic religion, in this case Yoruba from West Africa and Roman Catholicism. After traveling to Mexico, Mendieta would become preoccupied with Santéria, especially its prevalence in Cuba, and the throughline of her work at this time reflected the traditional idea of ashé, a universal lifeline of energy often invoked with ritual offerings: of blood, of fire. It was in Oaxaca, Mexico that Mendieta started her most famous “Silueta” series (1973–1980), documented frequently with photographs, though embodied performance remained at the core of the work. Mendieta would lie down and mark the indentation of her body against the earth, creating a primal female shape which spoke to both a universality of the form and a somatic practice for Mendieta, where her physical connection with the land was both corporeal and divine, uniting her with the land she left behind. The resulting silhouette was then filled with organic material—often red pigmented liquid (appearing as blood), fire, or flowers—drawing attention to the absence of a body, unmistakably coded as female, with curved hips and an hourglass figure. There is something ancient and archetypal about Mendieta’s repeated rituals. Of all forms, it is film which offers this work the dimension of time, as we watch the figures ebb and flow, the flames flickering away, the deep red liquid seeping into the land as Mendieta positions herself upon it, naked. The “Siluetas” were iconic in scope, part of a much wider historical narrative which tells the story of the female form and its historical absence, the violence that this absence implies. With their consecration on film stock, these fragments serve as witness marks, offering evidence in negative of Mendieta’s fervent offerings to her homeland, an oral history otherwise lost to time.

In an interview with performance artist Linda Montano, one which would be published three years after her death, Ana Mendieta recalls the usage of gunpowder in her work: “I have used gunpowder in pieces and later found that in certain rituals the Santeros (healers in Cuba) make 5 piles of gunpowder, light them and if they burn it means yes to the question and if they don’t burn, it means no.” It seems like Mendieta possessed an innate connection to the materials of ritual, something borne deep within her, awakened and brought forth by her own invocation of ashé. Her usage of gunpowder developed and evolved over time; for the film Anima, Silhueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece) from 1976, it was used to burn a silhouette into a darkened landscape, the figure standing upright like a scarecrow and casting a shadow of red light onto the ground below. Five years later, Mendieta would produce Birth (Gunpowder Works) (1981), utilizing gunpowder in an entirely different form. Shot in stark black and white, it’s difficult to tell whether the sculpted figure at the center of this film, cracked and crumbling at its edges, is made from mud or ash—certainly something from the earth, framed by the riverbank, stalks of grass and still, shallow water. An opening tears the figure in two—less like a wound, and more like a vaginal opening, within which the gunpowder is set ablaze. Here, Mendieta configures birth as electric and fiery, confronting the viewer with her own vision of a folkloric beginning, as smoke billows in its visceral aftermath.

Confrontation is a theme threaded through the entirety of Mendieta’s oeuvre, as well as the work of Cuban filmmakers almost a decade earlier, such as Santiago Álvarez and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Álvarez would often feature a fast, frantic barrage of newsreels and images pulled from LIFE magazines, weaponizing the viewer’s own visual familiarity with police violence and political figures. With films such as NOW! (1965) and LBJ (1968), Álvarez disrupted the language of propaganda to perform commentary on state-sanctioned violence. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, with his most famous work Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), similarly challenged the viewer’s own grasp of cinematic language with a collage of images, still photos, and hand-held camera work. However, filmmakers of the Cuban diaspora often focused thematically on criticisms of the post-Revolutionary government, or on the social complications of assimilation as Cuban-Americans. Many of the most famous cinematic images of Cuba—such as ¡Cuba Sí! (1961), Salut Les Cubains (1963), and I Am Cuba (1964)—were all produced by outsiders, auteurs sympathetic to the ideals of the Cuban Revolution—Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, and Mikhail Kalatozov, respectively. Mendieta’s work defies the simplicity of these categorizations. Though Ana Mendieta was exiled, she was born in Cuba, and having experienced racism upon her move to Iowa City at age twelve, always considered herself to be an “other.” Her embrace of Santéria and its influence on her work signifies an active resistance to assimilation, and this thematic focus continuously tied her work to Cuba. Mendieta’s films share the same political undercurrents as Álvarez and Alea, and are just as confrontational: instead of showing violence, Mendieta suggests violence with an absence of bodies and an emphasis on evidence, on viscera, on blood and ash and on materials that are left behind once a body is consumed by the earth.

Thirty kilometers from Havana, there is a beach called Guanabo. A single film of Mendieta’s was shot here, only two minutes long and untitled, from 1981. The beach itself is idyllic, with palm trees and clear blue water, but we see only a silhouette, framed by rocks and seaweed and footprints in the foreground. The lines of the figure are carved deep, unmistakable; there is a head, and a separation between its torso and lower body. The figure will soon be washed away, by water or by wind, but either way by time. Towards where the feet would have been, the sand’s texture has already been smoothed by waves against the shoreline. However, unlike its mirror image across the ocean in Florida, this figure has not been cleaved in two. Unlike Mendieta’s other silhouettes, this one does not serve a repository for some other matter. Now reconnected with the land which she was once separated from, there is no ritual for her to perform, no need to manipulate the ashé, the lifeline which she has now reunited with, if only briefly. The figure is simply and slowly washed away, the ultimate resignation to her homeland.