Earth-Bodies as Re-Existence: Ana Mendieta's Siluetas Beyond the Limits of Ecofeminism

Abstract

This article engages the earth-body, or Silueta (Silhouette) (1973–80), works of Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta to signal the Western limits of ecofeminist discourses and imagine a human-earthly relation beyond them. Ecofeminist thought has gained traction in feminist studies, especially given new materialist interventions which mark its ability to think a non-anthropocentric feminism in a time of environmental crisis. I recognize the potential of ecofeminism, and explore the ways it informed Mendieta's practice. Yet, drawing on decolonial feminist theory, I argue that a global South context and the "coloniality of [her] being" (Maldonaldo-Torres 2007) shifted Mendieta's engagement with the ecofeminist project. I read Mendieta as enacting an "aesthetics of re-existence" (Alban Achinte 2013) in response to a dehumanizing colonial context, using her art to "re-member" (Anzaldúa 2015) the negated dimensions of her existence in the Americas. Doing so reveals a persistent Western humanist lens that underwrites mainstream ecofeminist understandings of human-earthly relation, and also thinks with the African and Indigenous cosmologies Mendieta incorporated into her Siluetas about alternative modes of human relation to the earth. As Mendieta re-membered her own colonized being through her art, she helps us re-member ecofeminism's relation to the earth.