Accounting for the body : tracing the re-enactments, archives and remains of Ana Mendieta since 1985

Nestor, Katarina Harriet Alice (2024) Accounting for the body : tracing the re-enactments, archives and remains of Ana Mendieta since 1985. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis examines how the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta’s legacy has been archived, fetishised, re-performed, and memorialised since her controversial death in 1985 through theories of performance, re-enactment and ritualisation. I focus my discussion on the following artists and activists between 1992 and 2016: Carolee Schneemann, Coco Fusco, Artemisa Clark, Nancy Spero, Elise Rasmussen, Sisters Uncut, the WHEREISANAMENDIETA collective, No Wave Performance Task Group, and Women’s Action Coalition. Their varying re-enactments, performance and protests illustrate a continual return to Mendieta’s death and through restaging, an ongoing pursuit of seeking justice for her through ritualisation. The artists discussed reimagine and reconfigure the politics of loss and, in doing so, speak to philosophical questions of mourning, tracing and presence. Jacques Derrida’s and Avery Gordon’s notion of spectres and traces, which produce a sense of repetitive restlessness and re-emergence, are fundamental to unravelling the myriad forms Mendieta’s legacy has taken. Similarly, through notions of ‘tracing the I’ and embodiment, I draw on the work of Denise Riley and Della Pollock, to question my ethical situatedness as someone contributing to Mendieta’s legacy. Several critics and theorists have discussed the iconography of Mendieta and her relationship to Cuba, most notably Jane Blocker, Genevieve Hyacinthe and José Esteban Muñoz. Instead of making claims about Mendieta’s legacy, I map the interweaving of these re-enactments to present an archive of what remains in her wake, drawing on the work of Rebecca Schneider, Ann Cvetkovich, and Peggy Phelan. This is situated within ethical implications of fetishisation, gossip as methodology, fandom, and anecdotal theory. However, as I show, the pursuit of accounting and locating Mendieta speaks to a broader politics of remembrance and erasure in art institutions and non-linear experiences of time in feminist thought. I conclude by documenting my journey to visit Jaruco National Park outside Havana, Cuba, where Mendieta created her Rupestrian Sculpture series (1981) in the caves. The act of tracing the sculptures is a fitting conclusion to the thesis, as it interweaves my embodied methodology and theoretical questioning of what is at stake when we seek justice for another.

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