 |
| Arbol de la Vita (1970). |
Whoever is familiar with Hermann Hesse’s book Pictor's Metamorphoses will see immediately the relationship between the human being and the earth, and will
quickly relate it to the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), the creator of "earth-body."
Although her career short -- she died at the early age of 37 by falling from the window of the 34th-floor-apartment in New York where she was living with her husband the artist Carl Andre -- Mendieta left a prolific amount of work.
By joining human features like blood and primary elements such as fire, water, and earth, she creates a unique language which is provocative, impacting, and at the same time intimate and engaging.
Mendieta was born into a politically active Catholic family in Havana under Fidel Castro’s regime. Immediately before her thirteenth birthday, she was sent with her sister to America, where she studied art in Iowa.
The pain and the separation from her country created a cultural displacement and exile inside her that she used and developed in her creative process, which she named "earth-body." She perceived this separation from the family (she rejoined her family in Havana after 18 years) as a sort of orphanhood and used this suffering as a driving force for her art -- opening a dialogue between the landscape and her own body. This dialogue was the main component of her work and is present in all her oeuvre.
Her performances and sculptures are a combination of the Afro-Cuban ritual santería and a metaphor of death, life, rebirth, and spiritual
transformation. Always interested in themes such as identity, female violence, displacement, and physical transformation, Mendieta created work such as Rape Scene (1973), a documentation with slides of violent crime, using her own body and her own apartment. Inspired by santería, a Yoruban-Christian religion practiced in Cuba, as well as by her Roman Catholic education, Mendieta used ox blood in her
actions and performances to create stains of her body, to trace the contour of her body or create an image of her body, as in the work Untitled (Self-portrait with Blood) (1973). She stated that the blood was not a negative force.Alongside her interest for the Afro-Cuban spiritual ritual, Mendieta was interested in ancient and indigenous cultures. Witnesses of these interests are works such as Bird Transformation (1972), a performance concerning transmutation in which she is naked and her body is completely covered with feathers.
