This subtheme, Land and the Body, explores the artistic, complex and profound relationship between marginalized bodies and their colonized homelands. Through a thorough analysis of land as a medium, the artists exhibited discuss a feeling of simultaneous ostracization from the land and conversely, a deep-rooted sense of belonging.
Each artist presents a range of different visual approaches to discussing this connection between the colonized body and land. Through the lenses of photography, performance, installation and sculpture viewers are invited to reconstruct their understandings of these romanticized and stolen lands. Laura Aguilar’s queer, mestiza body serves as an interruption to traditional landscapes and Eurocentric histories, while Maria Gaspar camouflages and absorbs the marginalized bodies back into the land. (1) Contrarily, Tania Bruguera and Ana Mendieta attack the subject matter from a more visceral angle. Bruguera adds sugar to her installation, Untitled (Havana, 2000) to exemplify the contentious and complex relationship between “contradictions of life in the wake of the Cuban Revolution.” (2) Ana Mendieta integrates the gore and Santería that is an inevitable product of colonization into her performance. Mendieta and Bruguera’s intentional usage of nontraditional materials elicits a purposefully reactive and powerful viewer response. Each artist explores the tension and contradiction between the alienation and displacement they feel in their own homeland. They carefully discuss their experiences as marginalized bodies without flagging themselves as “ethnic others.” Referring to marginalized bodies as “ethnic others” is a form of colonization that attempts to commodify and categorize bodies of color in stolen land. Othering stems from prejudice and the basis of group identities, prohibiting people of color to find individual identities. (3) Throughout this exhibition, the audience is asked to reframe their understandings and linguistics around cultural identity, belonging, marginalized bodies and the land they inhabit.
Macarena Gómez-Barrs, "Mestiza Cultural Memory: The Self-Ecologies of Laura Aguilar," in Laura Aguilar:Show and Tell, ed. Rebecca Epstein (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2017), 79–85."
"UNTITLED (Havana, 2000): Tania Bruguera at MoMA The Museum of Modern Art," Rotunda Magazine, February 2018, https://www.rotundamagazine.com/en/untitled-havana2000-tania-bruguera-moma. (Accessed April 26, 2021.)
Andrew Grant-Thomas, et al., eds., Othering and Belonging 1 (Summer 2016). https://otheringandbelonging.org/issue-1. (Accessed April 26, 2021.)
Maria Gaspar, Disappearance Suit (Sausalito, CA), 2017, performance still in handmade suit of dry grasses. Photo credit: Nicolas Mastracchio. Copyright. Image courtesy of the artist.
Disappearance Suit Michaela Shuster
Pictured is an image of Maria Gaspar’s Disappearance Suit (2017). This is a still from a site-specific performance in which Gaspar examines the role of the marginalized body within the colonized and romanticized landscape. In a series of “performative gestures” the visibility of Gaspar’s figure waxes and wanes. At times in the performance, Gaspar’s Mexican American, politized body is highly camouflaged. (1) In those moments, the line between where the body ends and the land begins is blurred, the two become visually absorbed and unified. When her appearance is strong and stark, her dances and energy visible, Gaspar cuts the composition of these scenic landscapes anddepicts a tension between conflicting feelings of belonging and simultaneous displacement. In general, Gaspar describes her work as addressing “issues of spatial justice in order to amplify mediate or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures.”(2) In this piece, Gaspar is utilizing both her body and the landscape as a medium for this discussion and collective gesture about the inseparability of marginalized bodies and the spaces in which they inhabit.
Gaspar’s Disappearance Suit must land in dialogue with Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series as the two establish a critical structure for examining land-body relationships in art. In her Silueta series, Mendieta sparks a discourse about the conflation of land, home, and the body. She began the series in the 1970s, where she would imprint her silhouette in the earth (specifically in sites around Cuba and Mexico) and then document its mark. Her work describes the landscape as a simultaneous “site and a material for art production,” a concept which is the crux of Land Art Movement. (3) Gaspar builds off Mendieta’s framework, however; she places an emphasis on the melding of the land and body rather than demanding the recognition of the body as the subject. (4) Instead of imprinting her body onto the land, Gaspar adds the land to her body. Her body does not demand to be seen, in fact, her presence is light and fades in and out of view. Gaspar humanizes and wears the landscape by creating site-specific costumes that utilize the dry grasses and natural elements of the earth. She melds the marginalized body and the land and thus reiterates her connection to an otherwise romanticized landscape. Gaspar’s contemporary approach serves as a temporal and fluid juxtaposition to Mendieta’s groundwork. Both these artists actively discuss the inextricable ties of colonized homelands and the marginalized bodies that are impacted. Between Gaspar’s performance, Mendieta’s Siluetas, Aguilar’s photographs, and Bruguera’s installation, viewers travel through narratives of longing, belonging, displacement, anger, violence, and perfect unity with respect to the land. Throughout this subsection and overall exhibition, viewers are asked to consider the deep-seeded connection, belonging and displacement between colonized bodies and their homelands.
The more you proceed, the more you lose your sense of time. It's like a life sentence, in which time doesn't exist anymore, memories repeated over and over. The smell intensifies, and the floor sinks under your foot; it is milled sugarcane, still fresh, still wet. Its vapor -sweet and vile- surrounds you. Your skin absorbs it and sucks it in. You hear how the walls absorbed the cries of those waiting to die. The echo trapped here with you is like the ricochet of shots from a firing squad. The walls are rocks, consolidated pain, suppressed pain, all of it pain. (1) -Tania Bruguera
With disorienting visuals, strong odors and powerful symbols, this installation/performance brings forward a very sensory and visceral experience. In this piece Tania Bruguera recreates her installation/performance first shown in the 7th Havana Biennial in 2000, in the Cabaña Fortress in Cuba. Cabaña Fortress was a bunker where many were tortured and killed during the early Cuban revolution period in the 1950s. Having grown up in Havana, Cuba, Bruguera had always been involved in politics and not only worked as an artist but also as an activist who spoke on social issues, including the problem of extreme censorship in Cuba. After Bruguera’s piece was taken down by the Cuban government, it was set up again in the Museum of Modern Art in 2018. (2) As it was displayed, the installation was placed in an unlit, long room with piles of sugarcane covering the ground, releasing a strong, overwhelming scent. Four naked men stood stationary, dusting their bodies and bowing. After adjusting to the darkness and ghostlike forms in the room, a small television showing black and white footage of Fidel Castro partaking in activities. (3)
Untitled (Havana, 2000), evokes a sense of contradiction in life after the Cuban Revolution, and was a piece that ultimately rebelled against the restrictive nature of the Cuban government and its authority of censorship, as well as that of America’s government. Bruguera emphasizes the body as it relates to the land and the systems surrounding it, in a way to undermine the relationship between the resilient and the vulnerable. (4) This can be seen with the juxtaposition of Fidel Castro’s body in the footage Bruguera reveals and the naked male figures that stand atop the sugarcane. Additionally, sugarcane is a prominent symbol used in this piece as it was Cuba’s largest export historically. This was a way to connect the audience to a land that is deeply rooted in colonization and the aftermath of colonization that led to forced labor and the pain of subsequent revolutions (overthrowing of governments). The visceral effect that Bruguera creates with her piece forces the viewer to reframe their understanding of political thought and social change by creating an environment in which the body is synonymous with the land and vice versa, they are metaphors for colonized spaces that have been affected by the aftermath. With darkness and the uncomfortable smell of fermenting sugar cane the viewer is forced to confront the truth of history through colonization, and revealing that Cuba is not the only place that has a violent history, but America as well. Interestingly, Bruguera was very inspired by the land and body works of Ana Mendieta, which can be seen through the references made in her work. (5) Additionally, this piece also works to reframe understandings of the marginalized body and the land they inhabit as well as points out our ability to bear witness yet also have the privilege to leave.
This untitled piece by Ana Mendieta is also known as La Venus Negra (The Black Venus). It’s based on the Cuban legend of La Venus Negra de Cienfuegos. Its history comes from the time of the Spanish conquest. According to the legend, a group of conquistadores found a young Black woman in Cayo Loco, a small island that belongs to Cienfuegos province in Cuba. La Venus Negra couldn’t speak, and she was used to being on her own and enjoying a free life accompanied by a blue heron and a white dove. The conquistadores disturbed her land and her peace. One of them took her home, hoping that she would do whatever she was commanded to as a way to repay for the conquistadores’ “generosity.” La Venus Negra was born to be free in nature, not to be captive. She refused to move or eat, so the conquistadores realized that it was better for her to live in Cayo Loco and they set her free. The legend goes that no one has been able to get La Venus Negra to leave Cayo Loco. (1)
Mendieta is able to express the feeling of displacement and exile by using Santería in her work. Santería is an African-based religion originating in Cuba, which helped Mendieta feel more connected to her home, her body, and the interconnectedness of both. By interacting with the land with a decolonized mindset, Mendieta traces back her roots in order to feel whole. Outdoor Santería rituals are referred to as monte adentro, monte meaning uncultivated land, and adentro meaning inside, so going monte adentro signifies “going back to the roots”. In La Venus Negra, Mendieta leaves the silhouette of her body in the land, establishing a connection with the land and her cultural identity. She then covered her silhouette with gunpowder and set it on fire. When talking about her work, she explained that “Later [she] found out that in certain rituals the Santeros make five piles of gunpowder, light them, and if they burn, it means yes to a question, and if it does not burn it means no.” (2)
Her allusions to La Venus Negra, Santería, and the land bring attention to marginalized bodies and their cultural identities. By making visible colonial power dynamics that still structure our present lives, Mendieta redefines what it means to be “othered” in stolen land. Even though La Venus Negra couldn’t speak, she refused to be colonized and returned to her home, becoming an anti-slavery symbol seen in Mendieta’s silueta. Through leaving a mark in the land, Mendieta is trying to reconnect with her home and heal the pain caused by feeling displaced. When she was only 12 years old, Mendieta’s family sent her, and her sister Raquel, to the United States. The Operation Peter Pan program mass evacuated Cuban children to protect them from Castro’s regime. What was thought to be temporary, became Mendieta’s reality, forcing her to explore ways of feeling whole through her work and Santería.
In Santería, gods and goddesses are in control of the land, nature is inhabited by deities, and it’s respected by those who practice Santería – not displaced, not exiled, not othered, not colonized. In her Silueta series, Mendieta reconstructs our understanding of Otherness. Who is actually the “other” when we speak about colonized land? Who should feel displaced, alienated, exiled, marginalized? Who commodifies and who gets commodified? By engaging with the land through Santería, Mendieta is reclaiming the ability to feel at home after being excluded from her motherland, mending her relationship with her roots and her cultural background.
“Unknown Cuba: Cayo Loco (Cayo Crazy) and The Black Venus of Cienfuegos,” The Cuban History, January 1, 2020.
Kaira M. Cabañas, “Ana Mendieta: ‘Pain of Cuba, body I am,’” Woman’s Art Journal (Spring / Summer 1999): 12–17.
Laura Aguilar, Grounded #111, 2006-2007, inkjet print, 22 x 17 inches. Courtesy The Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016.
Grounded #111 Jennifer Atkins
Laura Aguilar was a queer, Chicana woman from San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles, California. She was active in the art world from the 1980s until her death in 2018, photographing portraits focused on underrepresented communities of Los Angeles. This included exploring and uplifting the queer community, Chicanx identities, body acceptance, and the intersections of all three. (1)
Grounded #111comes from one of Aguilar’s many series exploring the relationship between her body, the land ,and the viewer. She took hundreds of photographs incorporating herself into the Southwestern landscape. (2) These areas are parts of the United States that European colonizers stole from Mexico. In this country occupying the land today, Mexicans and Chicanos are considered an “other,” unwelcomed on the very soil taken from them. With these photographs, Aguilar reclaims the Southwest and her belonging there.
Aguilar sits in front of a great boulder, her back to the camera leaning forward as to smooth the contours of her back. While most of the image is taken up by herself and the boulder, you can also see the dirt ground on which she sits, dry vegetation familiar to the Southwestern landscape. In the very background, peaks of hills meet a bright blue sky. Her form mirrors that of the rock, planted firmly on the dirt directly in contact with her skin. Her body seems to become a natural occurrence, melding with the surrounding landscape as if she’d always been there. Unlike in popular media and historical in portraiture, her Latinidad isn’t exoticized and her body as a woman isn’t for viewing pleasure. She takes agency with the camera and shows that she is simply existing where she is meant to be.
Maximilíano Durón, “Laura Aguilar's Lasting Legacy: How the World Caught Up to the Pioneering Photographer,” ARTnews, April 28, 2020, https://www.artnews.com/feature/laura-aguilar-who-is-she-1202684828.
Macarena Gómez-Barrs, "Mestiza Cultural Memory: The Self-Ecologies of Laura Aguilar," in Laura Aguilar:Show and Tell, ed. Rebecca Epstein (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2017), 79–85.