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Perfomance of memory and ritual: selected works by Ana Mendieta and Tania Bruguera

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Perfomance of memory and ritual: selected works by Ana Mendieta and Tania Bruguera

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PERFORMANCE OF MEMORY AND RITUAL:
SELECTED WORKS BY ANA MENDIETA AND TANIA BRUGUERA

by

Rhonda Rechelle Barbour

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements of the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
ART CURATORIAL PRACTICES IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

May 17, 2013

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Dedication

This thesis is dedicated to the loving memory of my Mom, Florzell McGary Brown.

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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my advisor, Rhea Anastas, for her guidance and for helping
to assemble to a brilliant thesis committee. This pedagogical writing process has been an
immeasurable experience. It is a great pleasure to thank my unrelenting committee for
providing new depths of understanding in the successful completion of my thesis. I am
academically indebted to Connie Butler, visiting professor and Robert Lehman
Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings, Museum of Modern Art; USC adjunct professor
Noura Wedell, Ph.D., writer, scholar and translator; and Jack Halberstam, Professor of
American Studies and Ethnicity Gender Studies and Comparative Literature. Each
individual provided an insightful and analytical approach to art history and feminist
theory, which was invaluable in the production of my paper. I would like to thank
Professor Samuel Reira, from Reira Studios in Havana, Cuba; and Thomas Crow, NYU,
Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art and Associate Provost for the Arts; as well as
Franklin Sirmans, Chief Curator, and Rita Gonzales, Assistant Curator of Special
Exhibitions, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I would like to thank my most
intellectually engaged classmate, Toro Castaño, who boosted me morally and provided
the greatest support during my most challenging moments.
I owe sincere and earnest thankfulness to my inner sanctum: Christopher Meza,
Richard Brown, Reba Barbour-Money, Alicia Barbour, Fariba Khalodan, Chere D. Lott,
Esq., Dr. Amanuel Sima, M.D., Linda D. Lott, D.D.S, Medria Connolly, Ph.D., Othella
T. Owens, M.D., and most dearly, the spirit of my mom. Lastly, I would love to thank
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my son-dog Riley for keeping life in perspective and for reminding me that his walks
were far more important than writing my thesis.
Finally, I would like to thank Tania Bruguera for her ongoing commitment to
politics and art.

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Abstract

This thesis argues that Cuban born artists Ana Mendieta and Tania Bruguera use
ritual and body-based performance art to explore memories of their homeland and their
respective relationships to Cuba’s political history. Included in this study are Mendieta’s
Siluetas, 1973-80 and Bruguera’s performance, The Burden of Guilt, 1997. In these
works the artists speak to Cuba’s social and political history through personal narratives
and lived experiences in relation to exile and political repression. Their use of memory
as a subject can be understood through the operation of “prosthetic memory.” (Footnote)
Theorist Allison Landsberg has argued that “prosthetic memories” are those that circulate
publicly and exist outside of the body, or anywhere the social “body” is present.
Individual works such as Mendieta’s Imagen de Yagul, 1973, communicate alienation,
repression, sacrifice, identity and gender. The thesis Mendieta’s influential Silueta Series,
which explored the relationship between the earth and the artist’s body as a symbolic
form, and Bruguera’s politically infused performative works that emerged in the early
1990s.
The methodology of this paper is grounded in feminist theory and takes into
account the context of the post-socialist period beginning in the late 1980’s and early
1990’s after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. These events
caused the greatest cultural and ideological shift in Cuba since the Revolution in 1959.
The government introduced capitalism as a way to regain its solvency by
commercializing tourism and the Havana Biennial. The biennial also catapulted the
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works of many contemporary artists including Tania Bruguera from Cuban art
institutions into the international art world.
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Table of Contents
Dedication……………………………………………………………………...…………..i
Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………..……ii
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………..….iv
Poem by Ana Mendieta.…………….……………………………………….…………..vii
Introduction…….…………………………….…………………………….…………...…1
The Cuban Art World since 1989…...………………………………………………..…...4
Thesis Overview…….……………………………………………………………..……...7
The Legacy of Ana Mendieta ……………...………………………………………..…..11
Performance as Ritual and Santéria Practices………………………………………..…..21
Performing History: Repression and Collective Resistance……………………………..28
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………...…..34
References.……………………………………………….…………………………...….37
Figures………..…………………………………………………………………………..43

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Pain of Cuba
Body I am
My orphanhood I live.

In Cuba when you die
The earth that covers us
speaks.

But here,
covered by the earth whose prisoner I am
I feel death palpitating underneath the earth.

And so,
As my whole being is filled with want of Cuba
I go on to make my mark upon the earth,
To go on is victory.

Ana Mendieta, June 1, 1981

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1

Performance of Memory and Ritual:
Selected Works by Ana Mendieta and Tania Bruguera
This thesis is an investigation of performance works by Cuban artists Ana Mendieta
and Tania Bruguera. The objective of my paper is to register the ways in which Mendieta
and Bruguera’s performance strategies use embodiment or re-enactment to relay
collective memories of Cuba’s social and political histories. These memories are not
entirely the artists’ own, but rather shared public memories of homeland that have
influenced their work and become part of its meaning...
In her 2004 book on the mass culture of memory, Alison Landsberg developed the
theory of “prosthetic memory”
1
, which is based upon the assertion that our individual and
social memories “are increasingly ‘indirect’ experiences, construed through medialization
and dislocation.”
2
While Landsberg frames her argument in the context of mass
technologies such as cinema and the impact that it has on individual subjectivity, I argue
that this notion of “prosthetic memory” is applicable to the artistic production of these
artists as impacted by Cuba’s collective history and the effect that it has had on the
production of meaning in their work. My thesis will explore the ways in which Cuba’s
history of confinement, isolation, trauma, and socio-cultural repression has formed each
artist’s works. This paper will focus on “the role of the individual body and bodily
experience as the [mediator] of prosthetic memory.”
3


1
Landsberg, Allison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass
Culture, Columbia University Press, 2004.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.

2

The autobiographical works of Ana Mendieta were inspired by Afro-Cuban
Syncretic traditions that are rich in mysticism and metaphor. Mendieta engaged the
natural world through a fusion of earth-body works and earth-body sculptures. Mendieta
was born on November 18, 1947 in Havana, Cuba into a politically prominent Catholic
family. Her father Ignacio Alberto Mendieta was an attorney and a member of the left-
wing Authentic Cuban Revolutionary Party.
4
He opposed the Castro regime and was
later imprisoned for his political defection. In 1961, at the age of twelve, Mendieta was
among 14,000 children forced to leave Cuba for the United States. The evacuation was
executed under a clandestine CIA mission called Operation Peter Pan, a program that
operated under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Miami and the U.S.
State Department. Mendieta was granted political asylum as well as an American
education, which she pursued through graduate school at the University of Iowa. During
her graduate studies, Mendieta began the production of her influential and now well
known Silueta Series, 1973-80 and lived in exile in the Unites States until her premature
death in 1986.
Tania Bruguera was born in 1968 in Havana, Cuba, into a politically distinguished
middle-class family. She was part of the Higher Institute of Arts (ISA) class of 1992,
whose alumni gained international recognition during the fourth Havana Biennial, when
Cuba’s cultural production was pushed to a broader world stage as a result of an
increasingly globalized contemporary art world. Bruguera’s work critiques structures of
authority and power. Her artistic practice engages socio-political interactions, exploring

4
Latin American Art Journal, February 26th, 2011.

3

both the physical and psychological implications for the artist and her audience. After
graduating ISA Bruguera began working with at-risk youths at Guanabacoa Conduct
School, which piqued her interest in the impact of behavior, representation, and politics.
Bruguera’s study of behavior as a form of performance was part of a logical progression
towards re-scripting or re-enactment. Since performance studies was not offered in
Cuba’s academies, she immigrated to the United States in 2004 to attend a performance-
directed graduate program at the School of Arts Institute in Chicago. Inspired by the
intersection of art and behavior, in 2003 Bruguera founded the Cátedra Arte de Conducta
(Behavior Art School), a pedagogical program that focused on behavior and political art.
Sanctioned by ISA, the classes were held in her studio in Havana. The performance work
that came out of Arte de Conducta involved constructing social situations that generated
real responses from audiences. Behavior art
5
is closely related to her current work Arte
Útil (Useful Art). “Useful Art is a way of working with aesthetic experiences that focus
on the implementation of art in society where art's function is no longer to be a space for
‘signaling’ problems, but the place from which to create the proposal and implementation
of possible solutions.”
6
Under the guise of Arte Útil, in 2010 Bruguera launched
Immigrant Movement International (IMI), a five-year social political experiment to
redefine the image of the immigrant in America. The objective of IMI is to build

5
Nardo, Francesca di. “Arte de Conducta,” Janus, vol. I, no. 22, January 2007, Brussels, Belgium (illus.) pp. 78–
83. Behavior Art involves a set of actions that have a transformative effect on public spaces through art that transcends
symbolic representations or metaphors. Behavior Art also places the audience in a situation as a participant in the
context of the institution being critiqued. The importance of Behavior Art is its ability to create actions within a set of
power relationships, rather than through the representations of those relationships.
6
Bruguera, Tania. "Introduction on Useful Art Political," A conversation on Useful Art, Immigrant Movement
International, April 23, 2011, New York, Corona, Queens.
http://www.youtube.com/user/immigrantmove?blend=22&ob=5#p/u/4/MKPPmmNVuAs

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stronger migrant communities by giving greater agency to immigrants in understanding
their rights. This thesis focuses on the performance-based works of Mendieta and
Bruguera whose works created a new form of subjectivity and theatricality while
interacting with the natural environment or executing re-enactments as form of a political
intervention. In this paper, I will explore the role of the artist’s body and bodily
experiences as used in performative works, both in alternative physical spaces and
alternative exhibition sites that might be read as spaces of resistance. I argue that
Mendieta and Bruguera’s conceptual strategies embed shared cultural and historic
memories through ritual and re-performance practices. These presentations include
allegorical narratives that speak to coercion, displacement, human suffering, patriarchal
control and trauma that was rampant in Cuba—a nation that has existed in a space of
isolation and cultural confinement. Cuban artist Ibrahim Miranda explains the strength of
the Cuban imaginary: “Our insular condition has been a decisive factor in our culture,
influencing our myths, fantasies and our national psyche. The sensation of being
isolated, separated from everyone, floating in the middle of the sea, has been a strong
stimulus to the imagination of Cuban artists.”
7

The Cuban Art World since 1989
The end of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall caused the greatest
economic depression and ideological shift in the country since the Revolution in 1959.
Evidence of the threatening political struggle peaked in the late 1980s when Cuba lost its

7
Ibrahim Miranda is a visiting Cuban artist whose work is featured in the exhibition, Art
Revolutionary Island: Tales of Cuban History and Culture. The exhibition is on display at The Sarah and
Darius Anderson Collection at the Sonoma, 2013.

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most important alliance with the Soviet Union. Following Mikhail Gorbachev’s
perestroika and glasnost and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, Cuban-
Soviet relations entered into crisis. “Soviet leadership progressively disavowed Marxist-
Leninist tenets, dismantled socialist structures, and arrived at increasingly cordial
accommodation with the United States.”
8
Cuba then experienced the greatest economic
depression in its history, which led to a reassessment of its economic and cultural agenda
during the so-called Special Period (during Peacetime). The Special Period called for the
adoption of austerity measures and rationing programs to meet Cuba’s deteriorating
economy. The crisis caused the national infrastructure to implode, and electricity, food,
water, and petroleum shortages to proliferate. War-time rations went into effect
immediately. To express his opposition to perestroika and glasnost, Castro cancelled
existing trade arrangements with the former socialist bloc. These new reforms against the
Soviet Union were the antithesis of early Castro communist rhetoric that was once
strengthened by Soviet military support and trade relationships.
Such political transformations had unsettled the cultural sphere. The Castro
regime was challenged by a politically reactionary 1980’s culture that denounced its
revolutionary aesthetics. According to Cuban Plastic Arts Professor, Samuel Reira, “this
period represented a collapse of the Cuban imaginary that was fueled by extreme socialist
politics and censorship, which artists responded to in their works of art.”
9
Although
Castro originally intended to use art to spread socialist ideals, the government loosened

8
Pérez, Jr., Louis A. Cuba's Special Period an excerpt from: "Cuba: Between Reform & Revolution"
Chapter 12 - Socialist Cuba Section XII - Pages 381-387.

9
Samuel Reira, Reira Studios. Habana, Cuba.

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its censorship on art in the early 1990’s, when Cuba's top artists began to leave the
country.”
10
When Cuba began its retrenchment, the government looked to its two
greatest assets, tourism and cultural production, to stabilize the economy. Cuba also
softened its anti-capitalist sentiment and reopened tourism to the U.S. in the mid-1990’s
to attract the American dollar.
The commercialization of the Havana Biennial, which was launched in 1984,
would support and exploit cultural production in a period of national restructuring. The
Biennial went through several incarnations. The first approach was a monetary awards-
based system. After three successful art fairs, it switched to an intellectually discursive
model adding conferences, workshops, lectures, studio visits, and centralized and
peripheralized exhibition sites. According to Gerardo Mosquera ,during the Third
Biennial the backlash for participating in behavior that revisited nationalism was
increased censorship, followed by the decentralization of most Cuban artwork into one
large group exhibition, The Tradition of Humor, which was located on the outskirts of the
main Biennial events.
11
By the fourth Biennial, Cuba wanted the world to see its cultural
production, so the government capitalized on its cultural assets as a way to stimulate its
moribund economy.
The global reach of the Havana Biennial propelled the artistic practice of many
graduate students from (ISA) and de Escuela de San Alejandro (ESA) ’92 into the
international arts arena where their work was readily absorbed into the market. The

10
Frontline. Cuba: The Art Revolution. September 6, 2006. http://video.pbs.org/video/1593693557/
11
Weiss, Rachel, and other authors, Making Art Global (Part 1): The Third Havana Biennial 1989
Gerardo Mosquera: Valves, and Vestiges: The Curdles Victories of the Bienal de La Habana. Art . Spring 2007).
Journal, Vol. 66 No. 1, 10-26.

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sophisticated use of allegory and metaphor revealed great political acuity without anti-
revolutionary sentiment. Artists like Tania Bruguera, Luis Camnitzer, Maria Magdalena
Campos-Pons, Belkis Ayon, Graciela Iturbide and Ibrahim Miranda were savvy about
international contemporary art practices that rejected the national rhetoric. Their works
were unlike that of the 1980’s generation collectives such as Arte de Calle, Grupo
Provisional, Proyecto Hacer, who responded to the national crisis through a display of
politically charged imaginary and provocative public interventions. Many artists of the
post-Revolutionary generation are no longer emigrating from Cuba. Their international
success has generated prestige and a large influx of capital into the economy, which has
resulted in greater autonomy to travel liberally outside the country. Since the transition
phase of the years 1989-1991, Bruguera, like many of her globally recognized colleagues,
occupies a complex position which requires a constant renegotiation of (hybrid)
identities—as Cuban artists in exile and as internationally acclaimed artists from Cuba.
Thesis Overview
Ana Mendieta and Tania Bruguera have conceptualized different interpretations
of ritual and trauma in the context of performance. This thesis explores Mendieta’s
ephemeral land art carvings of female effigies in diverse geographic terrains and
Bruguera’s performative works that critique the abuse of political power and control.
The artist’s works reveal an engagement with the historic memory of Cuba, through the
translation of allegories that chronicle isolation, repression, cultural dislocation and
trauma. Mendieta rejected the labeling of her work as “feminist” because of the

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essentializing feminist interpretations of gender. Essentialism in 1970s feminist art
speculated that the subject of gender in art was only a consequence of gender
identification at birth. In 1991 theorist Judith Butler developed the concept of the
performing of gender. Butler argues the female body is a social construction, stating that
“gender as performative is extended to a notion of the body as performative [and] as
always a cultural sign.”
12
Here Butler cancels out the notion of identity on the basis of
gender because identity in and of itself is a cultural performance and not a biological
rendering. This notion of performativity is consistent with the work of Mendieta and
Bruguera. Mendieta eliminated gender specificity from the Siluetas by de-anatomizing
the goddess figures. Similarly, Bruguera negated feminist categorization by positing that
her work was spiritual or psychological engagement of the viewer on a psycho-social and
political level, and therefore gender neutral.
The first section of this thesis will profile Mendieta’s artistic practice through an
investigation of its relationship to the artist’s identity and cultural heritage. I will explore
Mendieta’s site-specific works that evoked allegorical modes of folklore, mysticism, and
syncretism to represent the pain of her exile and her powerful identification with earth.
Mendieta’s full immersion into her graduate studies and studio art began at the University
of Iowa as she embarked on the Siluetas Series, 1973-80. The conception of the abstract
forms began with variations of drawings and sculptures made directly in the soil and from
erosion mounds or organic ficus tree roots. Mendieta’s earth-body works commenced in
the United States and expanded into the remote natural environments in Canada, Cuba,

12
Wilson Natalie, Butler’s Corporeal Politics: Matters of Politicized Abjection. Butler Matters: Judith
Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies, Margaret Sonser Bren and William J. Blumfenfeld Ashgate Publishing,
2005.

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and Mexico. Though Mendieta rejected the feminist labeling of her art, she was actively
involved in various feminist art and political collectives in the 1970’s and 1980’s. She
contributed to the feminist journal of art and politics, Heresies, exhibited with the
woman’s gallery, Artists in Residence, Inc. (A.I.R.), and was an active member of
A.I.R.’s Task Force of Discrimination against Women and Minority Artists, founded in
1978.
13
Mendieta also worked vigorously to bridge the gap between artists in Cuba and
America. She was the first female Cuban artist to embrace two nations while actively
“negotiating and transcending boundaries.”
14
Following Mendieta’s untimely death her
artistic production would not only inspire artists of the 1970s, but generations of Cuban
artists who emerged in the 1990s and beyond.
The second section of my thesis will address the aesthetics of ritual. The
principal objective in this chapter is to explore the implications of “ritual as performance”
through a close examination of Tania Bruguera’s performance of The Burden of Guilt,
1997-1999. Bruguera’s ritual performances address pain, suffering, and repression, with
the intention of provoking an individual or a shared collective response. Bruguera
presented The Burden of Guilt as an intervention meant to destabilize the perception of
power, thus making the performance one of the most provocative works of art in her
artistic repertoire. Bruguera’s deliberate infusion of political resistance is conveyed in
her gesture of eating and symbolically consuming the memory of Cuba’s dark history of
suffering and resistance. The Burden of Guilt performance was staged in Cuba inside her

13
Roulet, Laura. Ana Mendieta as Cultural Connector with Cuba, American Art, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer
2012), pp. 21-27.
14
Ibid.

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home, with a mixed audience of local and global art aficionados spilling into the street or
encountering the event by chance. Although The Burden of Guilt was not officially
registered in the ninth Havana Biennial, it intended to reconcile the individual and
collective memories of the subjugation of others.
Section three consists of an analysis of Tania Bruguera’s performance Tatlin’s
Whisper #6, 2009 (Havana version). Bruguera invited the audience to approach the
podium and speak freely about anything for one minute each. I will examine the impact
of Cuba’s socialist-communist and repressive patriarchal regime as represented in the
performance of Tatlin’s Whisper. I will examine Bruguera’s performance strategy of
extracting collective memories from Cuba’s silent voices, in the context of the Wifredo
Lam Center of Contemporary Art during the 10
th
Havana Biennial. The participants
conveyed their collective reality to a captive audience during a global Biennial event.
"Over the last decade, Bruguera's work has evolved from being a critique of the Cuban
[condition] to a global examination of power and disenfranchisement.”
15
In this chapter,
I will examine the effect of Bruguera’s political occupancy in this space of resistance. I
will examine the traces of the collective experience she leaves behind by enabling what
sociologist Emile Durkheim called the collective consciousness in the form of shared
beliefs, ethical attitudes, and perceptions within a culture, in his Division of Labour in

15
Jeanne Gerrity, "Profile: Tania Bruguera," Maybe it will Fall Apart, Art Practical Ed. AP. In occasion
of "Recent Human Movements: A Conversation with Tania Bruguera and Adriana Camarena on Wednesday, Nov. 30,
2011, at Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco. http://www.artpractical.com/profile/tania_bruguera/

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Society published 1893.
16
The aim of this section is to examine Bruguera’s method of
political engagement in a space of political restriction while exposing the trauma of
repression through emancipatory collective action.
The methodology of this paper is grounded in feminist theory and informed by the
idea of prosthetic memory. Each recognizes trauma and the narratives of history and
establishes the framework with which to discuss how shared memory and subjectivity is
interwoven in both Mendieta’s and Bruguera’s individual practice. The core texts that I
reference on gender and performance include The Judith Butler Reader (Sarah Salih &
Butler, 2004) and Judith Butler: Live Theory (Kirby, 2006).
The Legacy of Ana Mendieta
Ana Mendieta was born into an upper-class politically prominent family in
Havana, Cuba. In 1961, she and her sister Raquelin experienced a swift life-altering
relocation to the United States.
17
The sisters arrived in the U.S. at the height of
segregation and during America’s darkest moments rife with extreme racial inequality.
In contrast, while living in Cuba, the Mendieta family was a member of the nation’s
political aristocracy; she was raised under the care of two Afro-Cuban domestics.
However, when Mendieta arrived in Iowa, she was perceived as African American
because of her dark complexion, and thus subjected to the ugliness of white hatred and
racial epithets, which was a common experience among black people in the 1960’s and

16
Durkheim Emile and Lewis A. Coser. The Division of Labor in Society, New York Free Press , 1997 [1893].

17
Viso, Olga M., Ana Mendieta, Earth Body: Sculpture and Performance, 1972-1985, Hirshorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, 2004.

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1970’s. Mendieta’s displacement was further magnified by the challenges she faced
communicating in English. Although Mendieta’s transition to the U.S. was difficult, the
cultural displacement in Iowa gave her the self-determination (freedom) that would have
been completely eradicated in Cuba.
During graduate school, Mendieta began drawing body forms reminiscent of the
female body and funerary effigies, as a result of her fascination with Mesoamericans,
prehistoric archaeology and mysticism that “integrated the spirituality of Africa and the
heritage of the Amerindian people.”
18
Never having completely assimilated, Mendieta’s
artistic practice became an outlet to negotiate the psychic issues she experienced with
dislocation, which became the ubiquitous theme resulting from isolation, exile and the
longing to return to home. Mendieta’s body became the mediator and the conceptual
reference of her work. “She worked with elemental materials to explore the regenerative
qualities of identity in relation to cultural origins [and] universal constructs.”
19

Mendieta’s sketches of goddess figures became more fluid while analyzing the
connection between her body as a form and the earth as a support for her investigations.
She envisioned the female body as primordial and sexual through the representation of
prehistoric Paleolithic goddesses. Mendieta’s investigation resulted in the Silueta Series,
(1971-1980), which she called earth-body works and earth-body sculpture.
20
The
Siluetas relationship to form and to the entropic forces of nature can be viewed in the

18
Gelburd, Gail. Ajiaco: Stirrings of the Cuban Soul, Hispanic Alliance, New London, CT, 2010 Pg. 51.
19
Ultan, Deborah K. From the Personal to the Transpersonal: Self-Reclamation Through Ritual-in-
Performance, Art Documentation: Bulletin of the Art Libraries Society of Nort; Fall2001, Vol. 20 Issue
2, Pg.31, October 2001.
20
Viso, Olga M., Ana Mendieta, Earth Body: Sculpture and Performance, 1972-1985, Hirshorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, 2004.

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same context as 1970s conceptual artist Robert Smithson, whose earthworks such as
Spiral Jetty (1971) involved the manipulation of mud, salt crystals, rocks, and water
which would erode over time. Mendieta’s work was further influenced by the Black
Power and Chicano and Latino and Power movements, which grew out of the Civil
Rights Movement as a reaction against racism. The combined social turmoil in the U.S.,
and the shift in Mendieta’s work from figurative to representational forms, precluded the
potential for culturally pigeonholing her work as Latino art. Because Mendieta’s work
was about the absence of her human form these dematerialized figurative works, the
Siluetas would ultimately contribute to the debate in the 1990s around gender and ethnic
identity, and lay the groundwork for the practices of artists such as Bruguera.
It can be argued that the trauma associated with the displacement from her homeland
fueled Mendieta’s exploration of the identity and self in connection with the earth. For
many generations, Cuban artists equated the idea of land and the isolation of island
culture to national identity and selfhood. During a field research trip in Mexico, she had
a serendipitous meeting with two fellow Cuban artists, Leandro Soto and Jose Bedia.
There was an immediate bond between these artists whose “works were paradigmatic of
the 1980’s Cuban Avant-garde. Like Mendieta, the works of José Bedia, Ricardo Brey,
and Rubén Torres Llorca possessed a similar affinity to mysticism and contained
elements of Catholicism and Afro-Cuban religions—e.g., Palo Monte, Abakuá. “These
methodologies helped them to codify artistic-philosophical discourses of a
transcendental, telluric nature, using invented rituals and carefully structured

14

symbolism.”
21
Mendieta’s relationship with Soto and Bedia helped to facilitate her long
awaited return to Cuba to reunite with family after an eighteen-year absence. Over a
period of seven years she returned several times. It is ironic that while she was making a
concerted effort to re-establish her roots with the homeland, Cuba was experiencing one
of its greatest exoduses. “In April 1980, 125,000 Cubans left Cuba for the United States
from the port at Mariel.”
22

Mendieta began studying the ethnographic literature of Lydia Cabrera
23
, a Cuban
anthropologist and poet whose critical text provided an important link to Mendieta’s
homeland and a shift in the trajectory of her work. Cabrera’s anthropological study of
Afro-Cuban customs inspired Mendieta to explore syncretic religious traditions, which
fueled her fascination with anaforuana (sacred signs) used by the Abakuá.
24
The Abakuá
is a men’s religious secret society in Cuba that practices a special form of Yoruban
religion through various uses of symbolism to sanctify burial grounds.
The land art production of the earth-body Siluetas began in remote natural
habitats in Iowa, New York, Canada, Cuba, and Mexico. The first Silueta, Imagen de
Yagul, was created in ancient Zapotec limestone grottoes in Oaxaca, Mexico (Figure 1).
In this work, Mendieta lies in a rocky excavated gravesite with her face and body covered
with white flowers, creating a poignant moment of prosthetic memory. The prosthetic

21
Ibid.
22
Schwartz, Stephanie. Tania Bruguera: Between Histories, Oxford Art Journal, Volume 35, Issue 2.
June 2, 2012. pp. 215 – 232.
23
Lydia Cabrera’s text El Monte was published August 8th 1995 by Ediciones Universal. It is one of the most
comprehensive books on Afro-Cuban religious traditions, which explores mysticism and history of the religions
derived from the Congo and the Yoruba natives.
24
Abakuá is an Afro-Cuban men's initiatory fraternity, or secret society, which originated from fraternal
associations in the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon. Known generally as Ekpe,
Ngbe, or Ugbe among the multi-lingual groups in the region, these closed groups all used the leopard as a symbol of
masculine prowess in war and political authority in their various communities. The largest populations of Abakuá
members are the district of Guanabacoa in eastern Havana, and in Matanzas where Afro-Cuban culture is vibrant.

15

memory in relation to Mendieta’s work involves the memory of the Zapotec’s history. It
is no coincidence that Mendieta chose the ancient Mesoamerican Zapotec burial site for
her first Silueta. The Zapotec’s past has many parallels with Cuba’s indigenous culture.
There is a shared history of colonization by the Spanish conquest that introduced the
Zapotecs to a system of forced labor tantamount to slavery called "repartimiento."
25

During this colonization period, the majority of the Zapotec population was destroyed
due to diseases that the Spanish introduced, such as smallpox, the plague and measles.
Moreover, the Spaniards tried to convert the Zapotecs to Christianity soon after they
arrived in Oaxaca in the early 1600’s. Similar to the early Afro-Cubans, the Zapotecs
combined their spiritual practice with Christianity rather than abandon their own
sacrosanct tradition. Zapotec polytheistic sacred practices were grounded in mysticism
like Santéria and consisted of two deities: Cocijo (rain god) and Coquihani (god of light).
In the same way that santeros practice Santéria rituals in Cuba, Zapotec hehiceros
performed ceremonies, including offerings of flowers, food, poultry blood, mescal,
money, cigarettes, and prayers at cultural events.
The history of the indigenous Zapotec people is symbolically represented in the
inscription of Mendieta’s body into this ephemeral space that contains traces of Oaxaca’s
past. Landsberg says if these “encounters with the experiential can be imagined as an act
of prosthesis, of prosthetically appropriating memories of a culture or collective past,
then they may make particular histories or pasts available for consumption across

25
Artisans in Focus: Zapotec History. http://www.rosengren.net/artisansinfocus/zapotechistory.htm

16

stratifications of race, class and gender.”
26
Mendieta’s Silueta production in Mexico
provided an opportunity for her to have a relationship with a collective or cultural past
that she did not experience firsthand. While Mendieta’s experience is not an endurance of
the plight of the Mesoamericans, the memories are nevertheless felt at the Zapotec burial
site. Mendieta expanded her exploration of burial traditions with the production of other
Siluetas, including “Burial Pyramid, 1974, Flower Person, 1975, and Burial of the
Ñáñigo.”
27
Mendieta appropriated certain aspects of Santéria and Catholicism through
the inscription of spiritual practices such as Santéria, Abakuá, Palo Monte, Buddhism and
the philosophy of Taínos indigenous people. The appropriations or re-interpretations of
spiritual practices were manifested in reconfigured swaths of land equal to the length and
width of Mendieta’s body proportions. She excavated the earth inside the frame and
substituted it with elements that evoked a certain quality of ephemerality including
leaves, flowers, fabric, gunpowder and sugar to generate flames.
The Silueta figures, once visible on the surface of the land, were adorned with
flowers, dirt, and blood dissolved into an inert substance that left behind traces of a
goddess figure. “The Silueta Series is not just concerned with traces of the body or the
absence of the body […] but it also includes the body itself.”
28
Feminist art critics have
paralleled the Siluetas with goddess culture. As a Latina, Mendieta was apprehensive
about the essentialist feminist reading of her work by the predominantly white art world
with which she became involved in the United States. She was apprehensive about the

26
Landsberg, Allison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of
Mass Culture, Columbia University Press, 2004. Pg.35.
27
Ibid.
28
Best, Susan. The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta, Association of Art Historians, 2007. Pp. 62-63.

17

lack of understanding among art critics who could not grasp the mythological references
of her artist practice. Mendieta’s position is justified in Lillian Manzor’s text The Two
Tropicanas, in which Manzor speaks to the issue of feminist criticism aligned with
gender, race and ethnicity, stating that Mendieta’s “work had been reduced to either
‘feminist’ or ‘Hispanic’ […] such products of a monocultural critical approach are
insufficient if one wants to understand the hybrid nature in Mendieta’s work.”
29

Moreover, in order to distance the Siluetas from essentialist feminist associations,
Mendieta removed the hands and arms from the Siluetas making them more abstract in
order to “keep her work “open”
30
and free from misinterpretation, and distancing herself
from essentialist feminists.
"For Mendieta ancient and primitive cultures were more ‘authentic’ and their
respect for natural resources appealed to her.”
31
Mendieta’s close relationship with nature
was dialogic as she was in a constant state of discourse between the physical, the
spiritual, and the earth, as the supreme resting place for life and following death.
Mendieta’s site-specific work in the natural world was a signifier for her homeland. Thus
by leaving a marking, a carving, or a staining as a way to inscribe her body into the land,
the earth became an extension of her.
“I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the
female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a
direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba)
during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having

29
Manzor, Lillian. From Minimalism to Performative Excess: The Two Tropicanas, Latinas on Stage, Ed. Alicia
Arrizón and Lillian Manzor, Third Woman Press, Berkley, 1995..
30
Viso, Olga M., Ana Mendieta, Earth Body: Sculpture and Performance, 1972-1985, Hirshorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, 2004.Pg. 198..
31
Ibid. Pg. 109.

18

been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish
the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal
source. Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the
earth.”
32

This reflective passage reveals this interior engagement between Mendieta and the
natural world that gave her a sense of belonging as well as a metaphorical link to her
homeland. The longing for Cuba would shift in the 1980’s. Several New York-based
cultural organizations were interested in building a cultural exchange with Cuba and
therefore sponsored Mendieta’s return home. The reconnection with family and the
country impacted her work with the Siluetas. Mendieta’s conceptual work would shift
thematically. The new sculptural works retained an ephemeral essence as Mendieta
began working outside the frame of her body. These sculptures included found objects
that Mendieta mixed with organic elements, which over time left a natural imprint on the
object. Mendieta’s ill-fated death precluded the further evolution of her work until Tania
Bruguera began her exploration into Mendieta’s artistic practice.
Bruguera believed that Mendieta’s art represented Cuba’s collective
consciousness. She worked assiduously to re-integrate Mendieta’s name into the cultural
dialogue. As a nineteen year-old art student, Bruguera began a ten-year tribute to
Mendieta as a way of extending the artist’s legacy in Cuba. During this period, Bruguera
would begin to define her own artistic practice by appropriating and re-enacting
Mendieta’s work. Bruguera’s re-enactment of Mendieta’s material necessitated a
corporeal understanding of the artist’s work. The feminist reading of Mendieta’s work

32
Quoted in Petra Barreras del Rio and John Perreault, Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective, The New Museum
of Contemporary Art, New York 1988, p.10.

19

caused Bruguera to consider the feminist character of her own practice and, in particular,
the nature of her appropriation. Bruguera’s initial execution of Mendieta’s performative
works in Cuba had a negative reception. In the 1980s, Mendieta had become a politically
controversial figure when she was developing a cultural dialogue between artists from the
U.S. and Cuba. She was acting as an unofficial cultural ambassador when the U.S. was
considering a potential collaboration. Although Mendieta was perceived as a Cuban-
American exile in the homeland, Bruguera persevered in re-inscribing her artistic legacy
in spite of bureaucratic policies intended to erase the cultural contributions of Cuban
expatriates.
In Bruguera’s thesis show, Ana Mendieta Tania Bruguera, the artist paid homage
to the memory of Ana Mendieta. The exhibition included re-interpreted configurations of
“earth sculptures including Nile Born 1984; the candle silhouetted figure Ñáñigo Burial,
1976”
33
; and re-enactments of Mendieta’s original performances principally, Body
Tracks.
34
In the re-performance of Body Tracks, Bruguera’s hands were dipped in a
container of animal blood and tempera, then hard-pressed and dragged down sheets of
paper; comparable to Mendieta’s performance at the University of Iowa in 1974. Over
the following years, Bruguera would perform highly visceral, metaphorical performances
that “typically featured the artist performing demanding rituals in the nude.”
35
The
recuperation of iconic 1970s performance works is a strategy used by a number of post-

33
Viso, Olga. Ana Mendieta Earth Body: Sculpture and Performance, 1972-1985 Hirshorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden. 2004. Pg. 253.
34
Ana Mendieta originally performed Body Tracks in April 1982 at Franklin Furnace in New York City.
35
Posner, H., Mosquera, G., & Lambert-Beatty, C. (2009). Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary
Italy: Ed Charta.

20

feminist artists of the 1990’s generation. Janine Antoni’s work involved interventions
into the narratives of feminist art history. Antoni changed the object of her critique from
the “cultural means of construction to a concrete body as a material territory…
complicating the 1980’s idea of the body as cultural construction by bringing theoretical
insight to the yet unexplored territories of women's psychic as well as cultural
experiences of their own bodies.”
36

In 1990s, Tania Bruguera curated Mendieta’s first retrospective in Cuba at
Havana's Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales. This exhibition, titled Tania
Bruguera Reanimating Ana Mendieta, was meant to make her work “accessible to a new
generation of Cubans, and honor her attempts to reconnect with their shared history.”
37

Bruguera realized the significance of exhibiting Mendieta’s work in Cuba because of
what it represented and the way in which Mendieta metaphorically represented aspects of
Cuba’s cultural heritage. Art critic Gerardo Mosquera interpreted Bruguera’s homage to
Mendieta, saying, “Tania Bruguera displaced the silhouette of death and became
[Mendieta’s] final silhouette, walking the streets of Old Havana. This transubstantiation
is also a utopic image of the possible union of all Cubans on the island and beyond”.
38

The re-enactment of Mendieta’s performances changed the trajectory of Bruguera’s
work. From 1986 to 1997, Bruguera was committed to keeping Mendieta’s artistic
legacy alive. At this juncture Bruguera began examining the role of feminism, feminist

36
Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, Antoni's difference (contemporary artist Janine Antonine), Differences: A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, June 22, 1998.

37
Butler, Connie. Defining Contemporary Art - 25 years in 200 pivotal artworks: TANIA BRUGUERA:
The Burden of Guilt," Various authors: Daniel Birnbaum, Connie Butler, Bice Curiger, Okwui Enwezor,
Massimiliano Gioni, Bob Nickas, Hans Ulrich Obrist. Ed. Phaidon Press Limited, 2011. Pp. 220–21.
38
Mosquera, Gerardo. “Reanimating Ana Mendieta,” Poliéster, vol.4, no.11, Invierno, Ed. Kurt
Hollander. México D.F., México, 1995 (illust.) pp. 52-55.

21

art strategies, and broader questions about representation and identity. “Bruguera
embodies an attitude of feminism (in the manner of Susan Sontag or Gina Pane) reluctant
to the intimate aestheticism that weighs down some art made by women proud of owning
a visceral organic body.”
39
For Bruguera, Mendieta was a very inspiring figure as the
first female Cuban exile to successfully plot her course through two culturally diverse art
worlds. Similarly, Bruguera became the first postmodern Cuban artist to re-inscribe the
memory of Mendieta for the 1990s generation, as part of its re-examination of feminist
art history through an archive of images and documentation. In the mid-1990s the
reception of Mendieta’s contribution to the contemporary art world began to shift. Her
earth works and early performances would “join the lexicon of conceptual and
performance-based artists of her generation including, Marina Abramovic, Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha, Rebecca Horn, Hanna Wilke, and Martha Wilson.”
40
At this juncture there
was a greater appreciation of the corpus of Mendieta’s work, as she was no longer viewed
solely as a Latina or Cuban artist.
Performance as Ritual and Santéria Practices
Re-interpretations of Cuban Santéria tradition have materialized in the works of
Mendieta and Bruguera. Santéria is a combination of Yoruban religion and Catholicism.
It has influenced the production of other Cuban artist’s works, including Belkis Ayon’s
iconographic paintings of the Abakuá men’s secret society, Manuel Mendive’s body
painting performances, and Jose Bedia’s abstract spiritual paintings of indigenous culture.

39
Castillo, Héctor Antón. "El "arte útil" de Tania Bruguera," Arte Cubano, sección Otros Espacios, no.2
/08, La Habana, Cuba, 2008.
40
Viso, Olga M., Ana Mendieta, Earth Body: Sculpture and Performance, 1972-1985, Hirshorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, 2004.Pg. 198. Pg. 26.

22

The Yoruba religion was imported into Cuba in 1511 by the first Africans who
were brought from Haiti and the Dominican Republic to replace the native population
that had been decimated by their work in the Cuban sugar cane plantations. The African
slaves brought the Orishas, the gods of Santéria.
41
By the 18th and 19th centuries, the
Yoruba religion came to Cuba directly from Africa by enslaved Africans that were
transported through the Middle Passage.
42
In Cuba, slaves were forced into practicing
Catholicism, but refused to relinquish their Yoruban religion. Eventually, both traditions
were honored and hybridized into Santéria.
43

Mendieta was born and raised Catholic. During the years that Mendieta traveled
extensively to Cuba and Miami, she immersed herself in Afro-Diasporan traditions.
Mendieta studied three divisions of syncretic spiritual practices derived from West
Africa: Abakúa (Ñáñiguismo), Reglas Congo (Palo Monte), Regla de Ocha (Santería).
44

She experimented with diverse rituals and incorporated them into her practice. Mendieta
had an affinity for Santéria, and was “fascinated by the symbolic power of blood and its
ritual significance […] I started using blood—I guess because I think it’s a very
powerful, magical thing. I don’t see it as a negative force.”
45
Her initial exposure to
Santéria occurred through the observation of her family’s Afro-Cuban housekeepers. As
a child she was instinctively drawn to certain aspects of Santeria, although she did not

41
Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel. Afro-Caribbean Religions: An Introduction to Their Historical, Cultural, and Sacred
Traditions, Temple University Press, 2010.
42
The "Middle Passage" was a triangle of slave-trading ports in the Atlantic where slaves were held in between
being exchanged for commercial goods.
43
Murphy, Joseph M. Santeria: African Spirits in America Beacon Press, 2011, Pg. 23
44
Viso, Olga M., Ana Mendieta, Earth Body: Sculpture and Performance, 1972-1985, Hirshorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, 2004. Pg. 63.
45
Quoted in Petra Barreras del Río, “Ana Mendieta: A Historical Overview,” in Ana Mendieta: A
Retrospective New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987, Pg..29.

23

know the meaning of them. Her work Sweating Blood
46
provides a clear indication of the
influence of the Santéria ritual. In this powerful performance, Mendieta’s head is facing
forward with eyes closed. The image offers a visually rich depiction of self-surrender
and self-sacrifice as the blood from a cow’s heart streams slowly down Mendieta’s face.
For the camera she performs the image of a silent goddess. In the 1970s, Goddess
feminists believed rituals are “body techniques which carry the powers and potentialities
of [female] subjectivity, as an embodied way of being-in-the-world.”
47
Mendieta
embodies the goddess image in its most potent form: a representation of human sacrifice.
The symbolism of blood reads as reproduction, the earth, female empowerment,
menstruation, and maternity. For Goddess feminist Asphodel Long, the notion of the
deity is critical to women because “it affirms that women can have a relationship with the
divine.”
48
In Catholicism, blood is the metaphor of wine; in Santeria, blood represents a
renewal of spirit. During Santéria ceremonies, blood is drawn from a variety of animals
like roosters, pigeons, canaries, cows, or goats, and is used in rubbing rituals as a method
of cleansing evil spirits that allegedly pass from the person to the animal.
49
Mendieta’s
Sweating Blood is steeped in mysticism and syncretic folklore. In this performance, the
viewer is drawn into her spiritual space to witness a blood ritual involving the “stripping
down of the ego to manifest a self-empowering transpersonal moment of voluntary self-

46
References to this work is based on an image is taken from a Super 8 film.
47
Crossley, Nick 2004. “Ritual, Body Technique, and (Inter) Subjectivity.” In Kevin Schilbrack (ed.), Thinking
Through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 31-51.
48
Reid-Bowen, Paul. Goddess as Nature: Towards a Philosophical Theology, Ashgate Publishing, 2007,
Abingdon, Oxon, GBR.
49
Rubbing rituals involve placing an item such as a bone in a bag and rubbing it over the entire body.

24

loss.”
50
Mendieta’s Sweating Blood piece was followed up with three other blood-
themed performances including, Blood Writing, 1973; Blood Sign No. 2, 1974, and Body
Tracks, 1982 (Figure 2). In 1974, Mendieta produced a series of films including Untitled
(Blood and Feathers #1) and Untitled (Blood and Feathers #2), in which blood was also
featured in the transformation of the body as a symbol of sacrifice. Both films explored
subjectivity as represented by Mendieta’s naked body, through a ritual of pouring animal
blood over her body and then rolling in white chicken feathers. Mendieta’s embodiment
of a chicken as an abstraction of an animal has allegorical references to spirituality and
freedom in Northern Mesoamerican art. Feathers are used in healing rituals to connect
the body with nature. The feather also symbolizes travel between states of life and death.
“One of the most important gods of the Aztec pantheon was Quetzalcoatl”
51
, a feathered
serpent that was able to traverse the worlds of both heaven and earth. For Mendieta, the
integration of feathers was an allusion to her willingness “to be sacrificed in order to
produce a new life, a new role, which in ancient cultures and in Santéria signifies the
highest honor.”
52

Within the syncretic religious system Mendieta studied, she was drawn to the
Lucumi earth-centric doctrine and folklore, where male and female Orishas are highly
revered and in some cases the deities share gender roles. In her large format Polaroid, The
Calling, 2003, Maria Campos-Pons, an artist of Bruguera’s generation, explores Afro-

50
Ultan, Deborah K. From the Personal to the Transpersonal: Self-Reclamation Through Ritual-in-Performance,
Art Documentation: Bulletin of the Art Libraries Society of Nort; Fall2001, Vol. 20 Issue 2, p30, October 2001.
51
Earth, Blood, and Feathers: Ancient Northern Mesoamerican Tradition in the Work of Ana Mendieta
http://artgrounded.blogspot.com/2013/02/earth-blood-and-feathers-ancient.html
52
Viso, Olga M., Ana Mendieta, Earth Body: Sculpture and Performance, 1972-1985, Hirshorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, 2004. Pp. 213-16.

25

Diasporic Lucumi allegories through aesthetic representations of Orisha goddesses that
are popular in Santéria tradition. Also constructing an image for the camera and using
her own body, Campos-Pons is wearing a white cotton and chiffon dress, with a matching
head wrap, and is holding a bouquet of long stem white flowers symbolizing shared love,
and the representation of the human desire for peace and purity (Figure 3).
Syncretic ritual informed Bruguera’s performative work, The Burden of Guilt,
1997 in which her body was the symbolic human sacrifice. The performance took place
during the sixth Havana Biennial in the courtyard of her home. The backdrop was a large
hand-woven Cuban flag made from human hair in front of which Bruguera sat facing a
crowd with a raw lamb carcass draped around her neck. She spent approximately 45
minutes absorbed in a ritualistic process of mixing Cuban soil with water and eating it.
“The performance was an allusion to a Passover ritual, in which water with salt recalls
the suffering and tears of the Jewish people enslaved in Egypt.”
53
The Burden of Guilt
was also a tangible re-enactment of a legendary tale of repression and collective suicide
of Cuban natives who ate dirt instead of surrendering to the Spanish conquistadores. The
memory of Cuba’s violent history is allegorized in Bruguera’s gesture of rolling dirt into
small balls and ingesting them under the pressure of the heavy carcass draped on her
body. Bruguera’s performance represents an immersive act of individual subjugation. It
is juxtaposed with the symbolism of the lamb that has metaphorical associations with
nobility: kindness and loyalty to God. It also has metaphorical references to evil masked
under the guise of innocence.

53
Mosquera, Gerardo, “Cuba in Tania Bruguera’s Work: The Body is the Social Body,” Tania Bruguera: On the
Political Imaginary, Ed Charta, Milano, Italy, 2009, pp. 23 - 35.

26

Although The Burden of Guilt was not part of the official Havana Biennial
program, Bruguera’s artistic strategy of disrupting both the contemporary biennial
context with a live event incorporating complex feminist and indigenous Cuban
symbologies was well received in Cuba. The work was made during Cuba’s so-called
Special Period during the early mid 1990s, when according to Bruguera, Castro’s
rejection of the Soviet’s revised terms of economic aid was tantamount to the nation of
Cuba “eating dirt”.
54
During the Special Period, artists and curators occupied alternative
art spaces, cafes, and artist’s studios in Havana where some of the more provocative
works were showing (Figure 4). According to Gerardo Mosquera, Bruguera’s re-enacted
performance was born out of a ritualistic, mystical approach to art, typical of Juan
Francisco Elso and other Cuban artists in the early 1980’s, which involved references to
the act of possession, the main spiritual moment of Afro-Cuban religions. “Possession
consists of a deity or a spirit taking control of the worshipper's body, usually during a
ritual dance […] and is typical of Sub-Saharan traditional religions…”
55

In his 1999 book Performing Pedagogy: Toward Art of Politics, Charles Garoian
wrote about Bruguera’s performance The Burden of Guilt, stating that “the artist achieves
agency through narratives that use the body as a site of subjectivity that convey the
memories of one’s cultural history.”
56
Narrative is thus the underlying process that links
individuals to socio-political contexts and is how Bruguera’s work functions. Garoian

54
Ibid.
55
Mosquera, Gerardo. “Cuba in Tania Bruguera’s work: The body is the social body,” Tania Bruguera: On the political
imaginary, Ed Charta, Milano, Italy, 2009, (cover & illust.) pp. 23 - 35. www.taniabruguera.com

27

describes performance as “contextual art, one that subordinates any pre-conceived notion
of aesthetic or artistic strategies to the needs of the [present]… and the impact of the
events in relationship with specific moments of history and audiences.
57
Foucault’s
historical analysis supports Bruguera’s notion that subjectivity is connected to the
political and historical conditions of a society.
58

The Burden of Guilt contains various syncretic religious associations—a naked
body, raw carcass meat, the presence of blood, and the gesture of feeding oneself.
59

Bruguera’s re-enactment of a tragic event gives the performance new meaning in the
context of contemporary Cuba. There was a subtext of culpability, sacrifice, and
endurance. Bruguera’s gesture of eating dirt while spectators silently observed,
represented a shared moment of prosthetic memory. In this scenario, the audience
imagined the trauma endured by indigenous Cubans in the 18
th
century through bearing
witness to Bruguera’s sacrificial performance. As the audience of diverse spectators
(islanders and tourists) spilled into the streets, Bruguera’s performance was no longer
private, but a principled choreographed display of resistance and self-sacrifice staged as a
public intervention. It is here in the collective experience that the prosthetic memories
circulate.
Performing History: Repression and Collective Resistance

57
Garoian, Charles. Performing Pedagogy: Toward Art of Politics, Goat Island: Spectacle as Performance At
Pedagogy pp. 69-97, State University of New York Press, 1999.
58
Hammack, Phillip L., Narrative as Root Metaphor for Political Psychology. Political Psychology, Vol. 33, No.1
2012.Pg.79.
59
Mosquera, Gerardo, “Cuba in Tania Bruguera’s work: The Body is the Social Body,” Tania Bruguera: On the
Political Imaginary, Ed Charta, Milano, Italy, 2009, pp. 23 - 35.www.tania.bruguera.com

28

Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana version, 2009) was presented at
the 10
th
Havana Biennial: Integration and Resistance in the Global Age, and executed in
the center courtyard of the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, the central hub
for discourse by internationally renowned art critics, museum directors, gallerists, editors
of art magazines and collectors during the Havana biennials. The performance was an
official event in association with “Catedra de Arte de Conducta”, Bruguera’s pedagogical
course sponsored by the Instituto Superior de Arte de La Habana (ISA). The
performance strategy of Arte de Conducta (“behavior art” or “useful art”
60
) is to
encourage audience participation and audience responsibility—to get involved and
participate as citizens. The objective of Tatlin’s Whisper was for people to approach the
podium and speak freely about anything for one minute each. Thirty-nine random
participants walked through flashing cameras towards the stage. For 49 minutes, they
stood facing a stirring crowd comprised of Cuban citizens, professionals from the Cuban
art world, emerging artists, students, writers, and art cognoscenti from the international
community. Participants engaged with great humility and dignity and waited patiently
for their long-awaited opportunity to publicly admonish the Cuban political system. This
was the second conceptual intervention staged by Bruguera during the Havana Biennial.
The first happened during the 9
th
biennial in which The Burden of Guilt took place in a
private domestic space where she allowed viewers to watch. The second intervention

60
Behavior Art involves a set of actions that have a transformative effect on public spaces through art
that transcends symbolic representations or metaphors. Behavior Art also places the audience in a situation as a
participant in the context of the institution being critiqued. The importance of Behavior Art is its ability to create
actions within a set of power relationships, rather than through the representations of those relationships. From: Nardo,
Francesca di. “Arte de Conducta,” Janus, vol.I, no. 22., January 2007, Brussels, Belgium (illust.) pp. 78 - 83.
http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/492-0-Ctedra+Arte+de+Conducta+Behavior+Art+School.htm

29

took place during the 10
th
biennial where Bruguera would move Tatlin’s Whisper to a
staged public performance at the Wilfredo Lam, the heart of the biennial.
Everyone, including a swarm of media with high tech video cameras, waited
patiently for someone to approach the podium willing to speak their mind. The first
person on stage may have been primed by Bruguera to set the intervention in motion.
The first person to approach the podium was Guadalupe Álvarez, a former Cuban
professor who introduced critical theory at Havana's University and Art Institute. She
was also a pivotal figure in advancing the dialogue on the so-called New Cuban Art in the
1990s. Álvarez stood at the podium and simply wept with hands shaking, as she clutched
the microphone. The second speaker was the well-known Cuban dissident, Yoani
Sanchez, who pleaded for freedom of access to the Internet. The embedded power of this
highly choreographed intervention was the questionable anonymity of the participants.
To the unsuspecting biennial attendee, the audience may have included random people
off the street when, in fact, Bruguera intentionally planted Cuban dissidents among the
audience who took advantage of this platform to publicly articulate the years of pervasive
repression and trauma. One after another, Cubans spoke about the years of intense
military presence, pervasive inequality, censorship, and the humiliation of begging
children. They sobbed, spoke gently, or yelled emphatically into the microphone:
“Liberty or Death!" "Onward to Victory!” "Fidel Lives!” and “One day freedom of
speech won’t be performance art! Tatlin’s Whisper is about personal agency—an
allegorical performance of a purging; or a cleansing of one’s soul of the years of
internalized angst against the national rhetoric and structures of power, censorship,

30

constant military presence, and the overall denial of basic freedom 50 years after the
revolution (Figure 5).
The military escorted participants off the stage who tried to take in extra talking
time. Bruguera’s intervention was emancipatory in that it transferred control to the
audience. Enabling this emancipatory space of resistance for the underclass to speak was
the brainchild of Bruguera who, as an artist, has the privilege “awarded by society and by
the history of the role of art and artists, to [negotiate…] freedom and tolerance.”
61

Bruguera acknowledges the criticality of her role saying, “It was my job as an artist
working politically to secure that things were done in a symbolic and practical way that
the people in power were politically immobilized […] the political was used to do art but
also that the artistic was used to do the political.”
62

The tenor of this event was both somber and tense. Each speaker takes ownership
of the podium for a brief moment, and becomes empowered to express his subjective
experience. Throughout the performance, the emotions of the participants (i.e., sadness,
hostility, and hopelessness) express the pain of deep-seated repression to a throng of
spectators holding video cameras, telephones and disposable cameras. In an instant, the
historic and cultural memory of Cuba is narrativized and the weight of its trauma and
repression rests on every word spoken. The most poignant language came from a
journalist
63
who read from a manifesto, which magnified the palpable resistance between
the government and the people:

61
Bruguera, Tania. Artist Statement, 2009, 1992. www.taniabruguera.com.
62
Bruguera, Tania. "Transforming the audience into citizen," 2 The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public
Practice, October 24, 2009, New York Public Library.
63
The dissident journalist’s name is unknown at the time of this writing.

31

“The worst of our problem is not how serious they are, but the
lack of perspective there is. I don’t dare one solution, but I think
that the path towards these solutions is to put mics at the disposal
of all those with an idea in their heads, and for these mics to
multiply and have a large audience. It is necessary first to
decriminalize the exercise of dissenting opinions. The day when
the decriminalization of political discrepancy is clearly answered
in this country, we will witness a transcendental event.
Economical, political, and social-cultural and many other projects
hidden into numerous drawers because of fears of being
misunderstood will come to light. Projects by serious pro-
fessionals, honest intelligent and informed people who because
they respect the law and live for their families have not wanted to
suffer the penalty we all know about. An additional advantage will
be the decrease in simulation and there will be less reason for
opportunism.”
64

Bruguera shrewdly blurs the line between reality and art. She is conscious of how
close to the edge an intervention can go before it materializes into a space of political
resistance. For example, when the participant’s critical assertions point to the binaries of
power in Cuba—the powerful against the powerless and the rich versus the poor, within
minutes the performance bears resemblance to a heated political rally. The performance
itself is a direct allusion to Fidel Castro’s first nationally televised oration in 1959 when
he broadcasted the national and cultural policy of Cuba.
65
In Bruguera’s re-interpretation
a military man holds the white dove, whereas in the original production white doves were
released into the crowd and one returned to rest on Castro’s shoulder for the remainder of
his address. The allegorical dove is a religious symbol that connotes peace and renewal.
In Cuba, “a white dove represents the divinity Obbatalá, a divine king who molds humans

64
Video. Tatlin’s Whisper. Tercer Texto, Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/13303930.
65
For artists, it meant that all cultural production had to reflect and reinforce the national rhetoric.

32

from clay in heaven.”
66
The idea that the dove returned to Castro’s shoulder represented
a metaphysical moment for Cubans who practiced syncretism. It “implied that the leader
was privy to local secrets and esoteric power.”
67
From that moment forward, Fidel has
been the appointed leader of the Cuban nation.
Tatlin’s Whisper is about personal agency, manifesting the absent voice. Bruguera
comes to the performance of Tatlin’s Whisper as the privileged feminist interlocutor with
the creative capital to launch a political dialogue in a location that can be read as a space
of resistance. Bruguera has the power to facilitate this political intervention in the form
of a civic dialogue on the state of repression and the condition of the Cuban people. Her
objective is to motivate the audience to respond to the system of oppression through
gripping personal narratives. Bruguera does not physically participate in the
performance, but her presence is symbolic—a representation of autonomy and freedom.
Aside from being a Cuban native, she holds power in the form of a government license to
execute the performance. As an international artist and activist Bruguera possesses the
artistic authority to transfer her power to the victims of systematic repression in a space
devoid of military presence. Her position as interlocutor thus serves as the catalyst for
raising the collective conscious and facilitating an emancipatory moment. Tatlin’s
Whisper was an allegorical performance of a purging; or a cleansing of one’s soul; of the
years of internalized angst against the national rhetoric, structures of power, censorship,
constant military presence, and the overall denial of basic freedom that still exists 50

66
Miller, Ivor L.. Religious Symbolism in Cuban Political Performance, TDR (1988-), Vol. 44, No. 2
(Summer, 2000), pp. 30-55, The MIT Press (pg 30).
67
Ibid.

33

years after the revolution. Bruguera’s performance demonstrates the serious effect of the
prevalent trauma and memory conveyed through repressed voices, in the context of a
public art space that doubles as a site of reflection and prosthetic memory. As the
collective narratives were spoken, it was not necessary to have experienced the Cuban
history of repression in order to share the prosthetic memory of its legacy.
Bruguera says provocative performances have “a way of exposing the gravity of
political oppression […] the use of politics in art is something that has everything to do
with Cuba, because it’s a place where it [politics] is inescapable.”
68
The intention of
Tatlin’s Whisper was “to try to start some set of reactions or situations in which people
have to take a stand on things based on unresolved social issues”.
69
The reception of
Tatlin’s Whisper was unenthusiastic. In an effort to salvage the Wilfredo Lam’s
reputation as a space of artistic neutrality, the Biennial Organizing Committee wrote a
critical opinion in the local newspaper repudiating the performance and the language of
the participants, saying that they used the event as a platform to disparage the regime.
According to Bruguera, the government was fully aware of the provocative nature of the
performance, but they chose to project an air of liberalism in consideration of the
international presence of the biennial audience. As an exile she took advantage of a rare
moment of openness in Cuba to stage an intervention saying, “my concept of art as a

68
Corry, Frances. Oh, Behave, Tania Bruguera on behavior art and breaking the rules. The Eye: Spectator Publishing
Company, Inc. http://eye.columbiaspectator.com/?q=article/2010/12/09/oh-behave
69
Ibid.

34

privilege is: people give you the stage, confidence, money. Something great can be
done.”
70

The residual effect of the performance temporarily lifted the cloak of repression
and empowered art collectives and bloggers to coalesce in the streets and at private
functions to continue the transformational discourses on civil liberties. The organizing
committee responded to the performance of Tatlin’s Whisper through a written article
that was published in the local newspaper. The committee reinforced that there was no
collusion between the organization and the artist in a performance that would have a
politically destabilizing effect in the community. For Bruguera, the performance
demonstrated to the Cuban community that Tatlin’s Whisper succeeded as a political
intervention, and that it was not a fabrication purely for the global audience.
Conclusion
Feminism in the context of Cuba is informed by its national history associated
with trauma, violence, and hierarchies of control. The artistic practices of Mendieta and
Bruguera have responded to forced dislocation and to structures of power. The ideas
established in this thesis have analyzed specific performances through postmodern
theories including Judith Butler’s feminist theory of performativity, which argues the
female body is a social construction, and that “gender as performative is extended to a
notion of the body as performative [and] as always a cultural sign.”
71
Furthermore,

70
Pantuyeva, Anya "Tania Bruguera: An artist should never avoid looking into hell," Tania Bruguera’s interview for
OpenSpace.ru, New York, February 2010. http://www.openspace.ru/art/events/details/18196/

71
Wilson Natalie, Butler’s Corporeal Politics: Matters of Politicized Abjection. Butler Matters: Judith
Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies, Margaret Sonser Bren and William J. Blumfenfeld Ashgate Publishing,
2005.

35

Butler argues that gender is “an ‘act’ broadly construed, which constructs the social
fiction of its own psychological interiority."
72
In other words, gender is a socio-cultural
construction, not a biological or psychosomatic fact. Both artists have carried out
performative routines where Bruguera’s physical presence as an interlocutor in a
repressed culture activated a collective response leading to an emancipatory moment.
Mendieta’s body signified a relationship to earth, a signifier of the homeland and the
ephemerality of the spirit.
The ways in which cultural and historic memories have influenced the cultural
production of Mendieta and Bruguera was explored through the reading of Allison
Landsberg’s “prosthetic memory”. Cultural and historic memories are embedded in
performances that explore subjectivity and inscription as seen in Mendieta’s ephemeral
Silueta Series,1973-80 productions in diverse geographic terrains and Bruguera’s
performative corporeal works that critique the abuse of political power and control. I
argue that this notion of “prosthetic memory” is applicable to their artistic strategies in
association with Cuba’s history and the effect that it has had on the artists’ subjectivity.
Prosthetic memories circulate publicly. They are not of the body, but are analogous to a
prosthesis that exists outside of the body or anywhere the “body” is present. Whether
Mendieta is leaving imprints of her body on the various terrains or Bruguera is re-
enacting acts of submission, the individual body performs as a mediator of “prosthetic
memories”. Prosthetic memories do not require the artist’s to be primary victims of
trauma because the memories of Cuba’s traumatic past continues to circulate in the public

72
Purdue University Department of Education, Judith Butler on Gender & Sex and Performativity.
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/genderandsex/modules/butlerperformativity.html

36

sphere and are thus attached to the mediator(s)—Bruguera in spaces of resistance, and for
Mendieta in alternative natural environments, and/or shared with the collective audience.

37

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43

Figure 1. Ana Mendieta, Imagen de Yagul, 1973. Lifetime color photograph © The
Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.

44

Figure 2. Ana Mendieta, Sweating Blood, 1973 (Iowa). Stills from Super 8 color silent
film © Olga Viso Unseen Mendieta, Prestel Verlag, 2008.

45

Figure 3. Maria Campos-Pons, The Calling, 2003. Artist Overview: A Woman’s Healing
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46

Figure 4. Tania Bruguera, The Burden of Guilt, 1997. Image is from the archive of Tania
Brugera. http://www.taniabrugera.com

47

Figure 5. Tania Bruguera, Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana version), 2009. Materials: Stage,
podium, microphones, one loudspeaker inside and one outside of the building,
two persons in military outfits, white dove, one minute free of censorship per speaker,
200 disposable cameras with flash. Image is from the archive of Tania Brugera.
http://www.taniabrugera.com

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Creator Barbour, Rhonda ReChelle (author)

Core Title Perfomance of memory and ritual: selected works by Ana Mendieta and Tania Bruguera

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 04/25/2013

Defense Date 04/24/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag afro-cuban,afro-cuban iconography.body tracks,ajiaco,allison landsberg,ana mendieta,Art History,belkis ayon,body-based performance,Burial,caribbean artist,carl andre,chelle barbour,cildo miereles,connie butler,Cuba,cuban artist,cuban political history,curator,doris salcedo,earthbody,effies,female archetype,female identity,feminist art,feminist theory,fidel castro,gerardo mosquera,goddess,havana biennial,homeland,imagen de yagul,jack halberstam,latin american artist,latina artist,Lucy Lippard,Lygia Clark,maria magdelena campos-pons,Memories,memory,msytical,nabakua,OAI-PMH Harvest,olga viso,operation pedro pan,operation peter pan,Performance,performance narrative,rebirth,repression,resistance,Ritual,Santeria,silueta,silueta series,tania bruguera,tatlin's last whisper,the burden of guilt,zapotec

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