Tracing the body in Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series

Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-born artist who was exiled to America during the Cuban revolution. During her artistic
practice in the 1970s and 1980s, Mendieta externalized through her body, the oppression to which the women of the
Latin American diaspora, were subject to, in the United States. Mendieta’s most known body of work which enabled
her to situate herself outside of the oppression she received as both a woman and as an immigrant in American
society, was arguably her Silueta Series (1973-1980). The series had over two-hundred Siluetas, each one involved
the incorporation of the artist’s body, either materialized through Mendieta physically imprinting her naked body
onto the earth or ‘constructing it out of a surrogate form of herself’1 into various natural environments such as rivers,
meadows and liminal zones of the seashore. Therefore, through Mendieta’s various iterations of the female form and
the multiple earthly environments in which these bodies were situated, the dissolution of the boundaries between the
body and the natural world; her work destabilizes the notion of a ‘singular’ monolithic body. Similarly, feminist
writer Clara Escoda Agustí recognizes this transmutation of the female body in Mendieta’s oeuvre, which according
to Agustí , reflects the artists own ‘transcultural subjectivity’2, in other words, Mendieta’s hybrid positionality as a
woman, a Cuban American and as a refugee. Therefore, this essay will attempt to explore how Mendieta’s uses the
‘body’ as a site to posit alternatives to patriarchal culture, conceptualized by the multifaceted presentations of the
female, racialized body and its interstitial connections between body and land.

To begin, in Mendieta’s first silueta Imagen de Yagul (Image from Yagul) where the body has been encumbered by
flowers, the artist illustrates how her body and its surrounding environment are inextricably intertwined. This
insertion of the female body into the foliage allows Mendieta to reconfigure her place in the world, outside of the
oppressive patriarchal hegemony of American society. In Imagen de Yagul (fig. 1), the artist lies on her back as her
naked body is covered in white spring flowers, obscuring her face, upper torso and genitalia, which prohibits the
male gaze. The white flowers seem to grow from Mendieta’s body, turning her unclothed form into a site of
fecundity, highlighting the natural cycles of birth and growth. This intersection between earth and flesh is echoed in
Merleau-Ponty’s observation that: ‘there is no limit or boundary between the body and the world since the world is
flesh’3, which highlights the decomposition of the binary distinctions that separate the body from the world. If we
adopt Merleau-Ponty’s view that the relationship between body and the natural world was ‘as close as between the
sea and the strand’4 this then suggests a fluid relation of ebb and flow, that mirrors Mendieta’s reciprocity between
body and land. Furthering this view, Susan Best rightly argues that Mendieta’s bodily chiasmus with the natural
environment ‘allows nature to be embodied and female embodiment to have a Place’5 and so Mendieta's particular
use of the of her own the ‘dark’ female body, juxtaposed by the pristine white flowers in Imagen de Yagul, negates

1
Susan Best, ‘The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta’, Art History, 30 (2007), 57-82, (p. 58).
2
Clara Escoda Agustí, "I Carve Myself into My Hands": The Body Experienced from within in Ana Mendieta's
Work and Migdalia Cruz's Miriam's Flowers’, Hispanic Review, 75, (2007), 289-311, (p. 293).
3
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, ( Illinois: Northwestern University
Press, 1968), p. 130.
4
Merleau-Ponty, p. 145
5
Best, p. 63.
white-male subjectivity as the central, and omnipresent position of perception, which Mendieta perpetuates by
consistently occupying the racialized ‘female space’6 at the compositional centre in most of her Silueta works. It is
worth pointing out that although the artist was considered white by fellow Cubans, Mendieta experienced racial
prejudice in the US as she was viewed as a woman of colour and in her highschool in Iowa was a victim of ethnic
slurs, therefore the ubiquitous presence of her racialized body in the silueta series further dislodges it from the
patriarchal and racist gaze of American society. Moreover, Best’s emphasis on Mendieta’s ‘claiming of territory’ via
the placement of her body, denotes her finding a sense of place within the wider ‘mother nature’, a longing that had
a particular significance for Mendieta, as a refugee separated from her motherland of Cuba. It is crucial to note then,
that Mendieta fled Cuba during operation Peter Pan which was one of the largest political exoduses of children in
modern history. 14,000 Cuban children were encouraged to flee Castro's government and seek asylum in the United
States between 1960 and 1962 and were thereby viewed as ‘properties of the state’. As such, Mendieta’s experience
as a child of the Cuban diaspora,or to put it another way, a dispersed commodity caught within the conflicting power
regimes between Castro’s leadership and John F. Kennedy’s (then)government, further propelled the artist to situate
her female body outside of an oppressive patriarchal authority. In Imagen de Yagul then, Mendieta has deposited her
body within an emptied tomb, and it is this entombment of her corpse-like body into the ground that reinforces her
endless ties with earth by lodging her body into the natural cycles of birth, death and decay. This links with the
belief in Afro- Cuban Santería tradition that the dead and the natural world are spiritually connected, which further
demonstrates Mendieta’s efforts to cling onto her cultural core. Ultimately, this links with Agustí’s observation that
‘female Hispanic performance artists attempt to negotiate their ‘trans-cultural subjectivity(..) through or on
alterations to the body’7, which can be observed through Mendieta’s repositioning of her female body into the
natural place ,which was drawn from the intersection between her experiences as a victim of American society’s
patriarchal and racial dominance and her displacement from her natal Cuba. Not only does this reinforce Mendieta’s
hybrid position as a Cuban American, it also reveals the multiple layers of oppression that ‘transcultural women’
experienced across cultural and national borders.

Furthermore, in the later Silueta series we may also observe the absence of Mendieta's physical body. In later images
of the series, we only see fragmentations or vestiges of the female silhouette formed out of earthen material which
suggests a digression from the objectification of women's bodies carried out by patriarchal culture and a
reconfiguration of the female body as a site of autonomy. This can be seen to be embodied in Mendieta’s piece
Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico) (fig. 2). The work, which was photographed in 1976, shows a silueta imprint
carved into the sand.The outline follows Mendieta’s exact measurements of her height and width, and the swollen
womb area in the lower recto of the photograph signifies that the outline is indeed a female form, and one that
specifically belongs to Mendieta. Therefore, Mendieta’s autonomy over her body is enacted through her physical
removal of it, as well as through her direction of the sculptural dimensions that the silueta outline will take shape to.
Moreover, Mendieta’s Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico) exists in tension with a phallocentric society that, according

6
Best, p. 63.
7
Agustí, p. 300.
to Laura Mulvey; was a culture ‘in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic
command by imposing them on the silent image of woman’8. On the one hand, Mendieta’s silueta arguably
internalizes Mulvey’s critique of the ‘silent image of the woman’, which can be observed in Mendieta’s physical
removal of her body in Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico) which indeed contributes to the absence of sound in piece.
This sense of diffidence is reinforced by the subdued and dejected mood of the photograph which was created
through the photographer's low-angle shot and darkened colour tone. On the other hand, Mendieta’s body in Untitled
(Silueta Series, Mexico) deviates from the fantasies and obsessions of the male gaze, despite its quietude, because it
conveys Mendieta autonomy over the construction and chiselling of her own corporeal form.

In contrast, in a post-war, consumerist America, women were policed into becoming seductive products to be put on
display. Michel Foucault comments that ‘[this kind of] discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, docile
bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of
obedience)’9. As opposed to a disciplinary society, aiming at making individuals, and particularly women, docile
bodily forms, Mendieta presents us instead with anarchic bodies, across the serial progression of her Silueta series.
The series presents bodies that have been dug into the mud, (Untitled, Silueta Series, Iowa), bodies that have
materialized into fossil-like creatures, (Itiba Cahubaba (Esculturas Rupestres) or effigies of the body that have been
set on fire, (Alma, Silueta en Fuego) . Mendieta fetishizes her own body through her earth body performances,
fragmenting it, mutilating it and replicating it. By fetishizing her body, iterating it into a variety of earthen-like
forms, Mendieta posits her body away from the patriarchal society which engraves its desires onto women’s bodies.
Furthering this view, Tony Godfrey argues that women performance artists turn themselves into the art object as
‘an attempt to reclaim their own body, and other women's bodies, from the power of men to turn them into sex, or
art, objects, the readymade’10, which we also find in the work of Mendieta’s contemporaries such as Mary Beth
Edelson and Carolee Schneemann. Indeed, what characterizes the readymade is the artist's intentionality that
declares the object as an art form. To that end, Mendieta, as well as Schneemann and Edelson’s artistic agency, lies
not in the objectification of women’s bodies carried out by patriarchal culture but in their own self-government over
their corporeal identity. Moreover, In Mendieta’s attempt to ‘reclaim’ the body, we may return to Untitled (Silueta
Series, Mexico), looking at it through a Latin American feminist lens. In Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico), we see a
bright, crimson red stain that has been placed in the genital or groin region of the silueta. This was created by
Mendieta splashing vibrant red tempera powder onto the lower region of the body, which carries strong connotations
of blood, birth and arguably the termination of a pregnancy. This holds a particular significance as in the midst of the
1970s, the military regimes in Latin America, extended their control over women’s bodies, in part through the
criminalization of abortion and the control over the distribution of birth control. Hence, Mendieta’s choice of
creating a bloodied genital region in Untitled, Silueta Series, Mexico arguably aligns itself with the Latin American
feminist claims to the decriminalization of abortion in military regimes, which was galvanized in 1976 by El

8
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16 (1975), 6-18, (p. 7).
9
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. by Alan Sheridan, (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 143.
10
Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art, (London: Phaidon Press, 2009), p. 372.
Movimiento Nacional de Mujeres ( The Women’s National Movement) a movement that lobbied for ‘women’s
access to reproductive rights and control over their own bodies’11. Moreover, Mendieta’s possible reference in
Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico) to the Santeria belief that a menstruating woman was prohibited from entering
matanza rituals; further locates the artist’s attempt to reclaim her body, within a Latin American context. Overall,
through Mendieta’s physical outline of her siluetas and the various other physical transmutations that her body
undergoes in the series, the artist is able to de-centre her body from the patriarchal hegemonies of mainstream
American society and Latin America, by creating a ‘positionality for the construction of new interstitial, border
identities’12. This, in turn accounts for the complexities of Mendieta’s immigrant Latina identity ‘in all its
hybridity’13.

Mendieta’s use of liminal spaces further contributes to the heterogeneity of the artist’s female, Latin American
immigrant identity. By embedding her body into a liminal space such as the beach, a transitional border between
land and sea that shifts shape as the tides rise and fall, Mendieta charts her own displacement from Cuba and unfixes
her body from the framework of white, masculine oppression. This can be observed in Mendieta’s piece Yemaya,
(Silueta Series, Mexico) (fig. 3) , created and photographed in 1979. Mendieta has once again carved the outline of
her figure into the sand, however, the photograph demonstrates how the rise of the tide has begun to disintegrate the
upper left arm and left side of the torso, which denotes movement. The photograph therefore provides a glimpse into
a fleeting moment in time, where the silueta has been partially disfigured and we can say with absolute certainty that
the silueta would have been washed away as the tide eventually rolled in. This notion of otherness which is
conveyed through the body’s indeterminate state of construction and deconstruction, is embodied in Carole Boyce
Davies statement that ‘racialized women writers and artists tend to display "migratory subjectivities", which should
be conceived in terms of slipperiness, elsewheriness [ . . .] As elsewhere denotes movement, the female subjectivity
[of Hispanic, immigrant women]’14. Davies correlation between ‘slipperiness, elsewheriness’15 and the female
artist’s ‘migratory subjectivities’16 is illustrated in Yemaya, (Silueta Series, Mexico).The picture plane is tipped
upwards, allowing the pulp-like sand and the motion of the shore to appear on the same plane as the body which
further instantiates Merleau-Ponty’s observation that: ‘There is no limit or boundary between the body and the world
since the world is flesh.’17Assuming this dissolution between body and world, the beach in this tight framing then
ceases to be a landscape and becomes figured, along with Mendieta's body, as a process of becoming, and what
Agustí calls ‘a subject-in-process’ . This in turn, negates Mulvey’s analysis of the patriarch’s rigid positioning of the
female body as ‘a projection of the male gaze and its phantasy’18. By repositioning her body in a constant state of

11
Francesca Gargallo, ‘Feminismo latinoamericano’, Revista Venezolana de Estudios de la Mujer, 12 (2007), 17–34,
p. 28.
12
Agustí, p. 293.
13
Agustí, p. 292.
14
Carole Boyce Davies, Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zone, (Illinois : University of Illinois Press, 2013)
p. 54.
15
Davies, p. 54.
16
Davies, p. 54.
17
Merleau-Ponty, p. 145.
18
Mulvey, p. 11.
flux, Mendieta diverts it from this notion of the ideal of a white, female body as a unified, monolith structured on
male objectification. Moreover, Yemaya, (Silueta Series, Mexico)’s sense of movement and fluidity therefore, tracks
the artist’s displacement from her cultural core, which substantiates the central idea to Boyce’s claim that women
artists of an ethnic Other, illustrate their otherness as a positive notion through artworks that denote ‘movement and
their female subjectivity’19 which can be seen to be embodied in Yemaya, (Silueta Series, Mexico)’s ephemeral
temporality. It is this liminal space of indeterminacy; in which Mendieta’s body temporarily inhabits; that reflects
Agustí’s idea of ‘the space of a disidentified subject in a transcultural identity’20, as the beach dissolves her
subjectivity into otherness, unfixing it.

Another layer of meaning in Yemaya, (Silueta Series, Mexico) that relates to Mendieta’s hybrid position as a
Hispanic immigrant woman, is that it recalls the goddess pose (a position which most of Mendieta’s siluetas adopt).
Not only does this form a connection with the Latin American feminist agenda, which according to Gargallo, sought
to propel ‘their status of womanhood and their shared condition that differentiated them, from men’21 which can be
observed in the omniscient presence of the goddess pose in Mendieta’s silueta series that relates to this primordial
kinship amongst women, a sentiment also shared in the A.I.R Gallery which was a women's art collective space at
which Mendieta was a member of from 197822. Moreover, Mendieta’s use of goddess imagery also taps into Santería
culture. The goddess pose in Yemaya, (Silueta Series, Mexico) relates to a specific deity within Santería practice
called Yemaya , the Orisha goddess of the ocean. In this sense, Mendieta becomes a symbol of the female goddess
which invokes the universality amongst all females and advanced the A.I.R Gallery’s obviation from ‘thousands of
years of patriarchal oppression’23, but hybridizes this, with her own racialized, displaced body in order to ‘bring
about a new experience of identity’24, one that is removed from the all-white, male hegemony of American society.

In conclusion, through Mendieta’s interlacing of her body with the natural place, her serial transmutations and
removal of her physical form, the ephemeral nature of the earthen sculptures in liminal spaces; this multiplicity of
her bodily forms suggests that Mendieta uses her body to inscribe her transcultural, Latina identity onto the natural
landscape. Moreover, Agustí’s suggestion that Mendieta is work is ‘constantly finding a locus of otherness’25, can be
said to materialized in Mendieta’s earthen-body forms that situate themselves outside society, diverging from the
disciplinary forces of white patriarchal society, by becoming sites in which Mendieta embraces her ‘otherness’ by
addressing the intersection between her cultural heritage, her racialized female body and her position as a dispersed
individual of the Cuban diaspora.
Total word count: 2807 words

19
Boyce, p. 53.
20
Agustí, p. 292.
21
Gargallo, p. 32.
22
Olga Viso, Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance, 1972-1985, (Texas: University of Texas Press,
2004), p. 63.
23
Viso, p. 63.
24
Agustí, p. 295.
25
Agustí, p. 295.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Agustí, Clara Escoda, "I Carve Myself into My Hands": The Body Experienced from
within in Ana Mendieta's Work and Migdalia Cruz's Miriam's Flowers’, Hispanic
Review, 75, (2007), 289-311

Best, Susan, ‘The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta’, Art History, 30 (2007), 57-82

Davies, Carole Boyce, Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zone, (Illinois :
University of Illinois Press, 2013)

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish, trans. by Alan Sheridan, (New York: Vintage,
1979)

Gargallo, Francesca, ‘Feminismo latinoamericano’, Revista Venezolana de Estudios de la

Mujer, 12 (2007), 17–34

Godfrey, Tony, Conceptual Art, (London: Phaidon Press, 2009)

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. by Alphonso Lingis,
(Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968)

Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16 (1975), 6-18

Viso, Olga, Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance, 1972-1985, (Texas:
University of Texas Press, 2004)
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Ana Mendieta, Imagen de Yagul: Silueta Series, 1973, Chromogenic print, 50.8 × 34 cm,
Edition 12/20, San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Figure 2: Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, Mexico, 1976, Chromogenic print, 61 x 36cm, Edition
13/20, New York, Galerie Lelong
Figure 3: Ana Mendieta, Yemaya, Silueta Series, Mexico, 1978, Chromogenic print, 52 x 23cm, Edition
1/5, San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art