Reenactments and the Politics of Remembrance

A Tribute to Ana Mendieta, 40 Years after Her Death

1_Introduction On September 8th, 2025, I invited a group of friends to join me in a private tribute. They were told to meet me in a laboratory room at the theater department of the University of Giessen, Germany. An empty chair was placed at the center of the space, lit with dimmed lights. In the back, a wooden board leaned against the wall. The board had a long white sheet of paper attached to it. Beside it, some painting supplies were lying on the floor. A candle was lit next to a white rose in the foreground. I greeted my friends who had joined. I told them that, that night, I would present a tribute. Not a lecture, not a performance, but a tribute to Ana Mendieta, 40 years after her death. [1] Born in Havana and exiled to the U.S. at the age of twelve, Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) became a prominent voice of the 1970s feminist art movement. Her ‘earth-body art’ combined elements of ‘land art’ and ‘body art,’ transforming her experience as a woman into the central theme of her work. [2] In so doing, she challenged Western conceptions of both ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ as she described in a notorious statement about her work: For the last 12 years I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast out of 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 the making of earth/body works I become one with the earth. It is like being encompassed by nature, an afterimage of the original shelter within the womb. [3] Mendieta’s art speaks of her desire to reunite with the universe, return to the maternal source, and, finally, find shelter within the earth. Her rhetoric on nature combines elements of an early ecofeminist discourse with ideas of the so-called ‘goddess art movement’ of the 1970s. [4] At the same time, her method of exploring earth as a female body foreshadows a pluriversal approach to nature, drawing on pre-Hispanic cultures in Mexico and Cuba, and asserting her identity as Other within the predominantly white feminist movement of her time. For all these reasons, Mendieta’s oeuvre remains an important body…