Writer, Carmen Maria Machado: My experience of Ana Mendieta is this one of strange synchronicity. The fact that she was Cuban-American, the fact that she was so interested in the body. I just feel like we would've known each other.
My name is Carmen Maria Machado and I am the author of several books, including the memoir, In the Dream House.
Nile Born is a sculpture. It takes the rough outline of a human body, but it doesn't have all the features. So you can see a head and shoulders, and then what I guess is the torso and the legs together as one unit. It's made of sand with a binding agent, and then it's the sort of general outline of the artist's body.
When you remove defining features, and it's more abstractly depicted, that gives more space for other people to enter. And I think that the idea of a non-white woman a person who is not normally thought of as being a kind of a universal asserting their body as universal is subversive.
Mendieta moved to Iowa with her sister from Cuba when she was 12, and she did not return until 1980 when she was 32.
When you are forcibly exiled or alienated from the place where you came from, the land that is familiar to you, or even when you leave it voluntarily, I think that it does do something to you. Especially as a child, to be taken from the place that you know and brought to this completely different place.
It makes sense to me that she would be sort of trying to make sense of it in relation to her body, which has known a different earth.
Mendieta considered making art to be, quote, “the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.” So she's using the earth, she's using natural elements. This communion with the earth speaks to the way that we are, or ideally should be, a part of our environments. We spend so much of our lives at odd with the natural world, but it's this place of creation and birth.