Ghostly body, wounded nature: utopian potentialities in Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas series

The emergence of Earth-Body Art in the 1970s met with a moment of enthusiastic reflection on the possibilities of the body and nature in artistic creation. The prominence of the performative turn (Fischer-Lichte, 2004), feminist thought, and environmental claims placed the body at the centre of cultural and political practices, encouraging new understandings of gender and sexuality, the human, and the non-human. In this sense, the Siluetas series (1973-1980) by the Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta constitutes one of its standard-bearers, by merging inquiries about the body put forth by Body Art performances with the proposals of Land Art. Although her work has been frequently approached from an ecofeminist perspective, we consider that its body idea exceeds any traditional representation of femininity, being placed instead in a paradoxical ghostly plane that suspends binary oppositions and their hierarchies. Based on the Derridean spectre and the analysis of its utopian potentiality, this article proposes a reading of the spectral bodies of Mendieta as bodies located in an indeterminate time and place, as well as a mode of aesthetic and political subversion and a manifestation of emancipatory futures.