Ana Mendieta and Cuban Cinema
Carly Mattox, The Brooklyn Rail
November 2023
Two figures lie next to each other, faces close together, knees pulled toward their chests, shallow water lapping against their silhouetted bodies. This seems to be a watery grave, with an elegy written by seagulls calling out to each other and waves glittering in the sunlight. We realize, then, that no, these are not bodies, but shapes made from mounds of sand, mirroring one another as they slowly disappear into the sea. This vision—the scene, the shapes, the sound—was captured by artist Ana Mendieta in her film Ochún (1981), one of her first pictures to include sound and, inevitably, the last that she would produce. Filmed in Key Biscayne, Florida, facing out into the Atlantic, only a small stretch of ocean separated Ana Mendieta in that moment from her homeland of Cuba, which she left at age twelve. She would spend her career trying to reconcile the violence of this separation. […]