Perhaps more influentially than any artist before or after her, Ana Mendieta’s ambitious, earnest artworks used the body as the central vehicle for navigating a diasporic experience and asserting a syncretic identity in the face of exile and displacement. In Imagen de Yagul (1973) from the series of Siluetas she staged and documented on a trip to Mexico in 1973, she embedded her body directly in the landscape, covered in the very substances that define it, thus staging an evocative doubling in which her body appears both to fuse with and emerge from the earth. The inherent ephemerality and site-specificity of Mendieta’s “earth-body” works force an awareness of the geographic and cultural contexts in which these performances took place—in this case Yagul, an archaeological site in Oaxaca built by the Zapotecs in precolumbian times. These works can be read as part of Mendieta’s attempts to lay claims to her ancestral homelands in Mexico and Cuba, places she incorporates into her own identity through the explicit, almost over-determined embedding of her body. Just as importantly, these stagings are inherently unstable and ephemeral, revealing another, darker side—the potential loss of the body and perhaps the self that such broad-ranging attempts to embrace diaspora can result in. I had the great opportunity to speak with Coco Fusco about Mendieta’s art as part of a boldly political project of cultural diplomacy, an underappreciated element of the artist’s life work after relocating to Iowa from Cuba as a young teenager at the height of the Cold War. “She was a real trailblazer in many ways,” Fusco told me. “As an exiled Cuban artist, she delved into issues and scenarios and situations related to her connection to the island with amazing intensity. She ventured where others didn’t dare. She went back to Cuba when the price for doing so was to be excoriated by other exiles.”
Ana Mendieta, Imagen de Yagul (from the Siluetas Series, Mexico), 1973
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