Volcano Series, no. 2

A touchstone for nearly all of Mendieta’s later practice, the Siluetas comprise ephemeral, site-specific works realized in Iowa and Mexico between 1973 and 1980 in which the artist imprinted her body into the earth using such materials as mud, snow, flowers, stones, blood, and gunpowder. The impression of her body into the landscape, sometimes camouflaged and other times present only through its indexical trace, invoked a reunion not only with nature itself, but also with a past stretching back to Cuba and beyond, to the origins of human civilization. “My Silueta Series is an ongoing dialogue between me and nature,” Mendieta explained. “The making of these works is not the final stage of a ritual but a way of asserting my emotional ties with the earth as well as conceptualizing nature. The color photographs are a way of capturing the spirit of the work, since the actual sculptures left on sites are eventually reclaimed by the earth” (“A Selection of Statements and Notes,” Sulfur, Spring 1988, p. 70).
Mendieta implemented both still and moving images to document her works, and the present photographs relate to her film of the same name. Shot in Sharon Center, Iowa, the six photographs document a ceremonial conflagration: white gunpowder, placed in a body-shaped (or vulvar) cavity of raised earth, begins to smoke and soon bursts into flames, eventually smoldering into a bed of black ashes. The images powerfully conflate body and earth, here erupting in a vital expression of life and death, the silueta spiritually and materially transformed.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park