silueta

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (from the Silueta series), 1973-1977, MCA Chicago. Image via Artsy.

Ana Mendieta, Tree of Life, 1976. Hayward Gallery, London. Image via Google Arts.

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta series, Mexico), 1976. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York. Tate Gallery, presented by the American Patrons of Tate, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2010. Image via TATE.

Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series is a collection of ephemeral landscape interventions captured in photographs. During a trip to Yagul, she made her first Silueta by covering her body in white flowers in an open Zapotec tomb. In a later image, her mud-covered body stands in front of a tree – a human translation of the tree of life, symbolising regeneration. The whole series includes over 200 works imprinted across the landscapes of Iowa and Mexico over almost ten years.

Part-performance, part-land-art her ‘body’ is created from earth, blood, flowers, leaves, sticks, stones, fire, gunpowder, fireworks, candles and cloth. The silhouetted form follows the contour of her body, the legs together, arms raised to the side in the pose of the Minoan snake goddess or held close to the body, like a swaddled corpse. When her physical body features, it is buried beneath material, camouflaged, obscured.

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (from the Silueta series), 1976. Richard Saltoun. Image via Artsy.

Each piece is subsumed by the earth, and only the photograph documenting a ritualistic relationship between artist and land remains. In part a diasporic exploration after leaving Cuba as a young child, Mendieta explains that the series was an attempt to “return to the maternal source” and “become one with the earth”. [1] Each Silueta speaks for the temporality of the body, existing in the twilight zone between presence and absence.

[1] Source.