ortega exiled space in-between space

PHILOSOPHY & GEOGRAPHY, VOL. 7, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2004

SPECIAL SECTION

Exiled space, in-between space: existentialspatiality in Ana Mendieta’s SiluetasSeries

MARIANA ORTEGADepartment of Philosophy, John Carroll University, University Heights, OH, USA

Abstract Existential space is lived space, space permeated by our raced, gendered selves. Itis representative of our very existence. The purpose of this essay is to explore the intersectionbetween this lived space and art by analyzing the work of the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendietaand showing how her Siluetas Series discloses a space of exile. The first section discussesexistential spatiality as explained by the phenomenologists Heidegger and Watsuji and asrepresented in Mendieta’s Siluetas. The second section analyzes the space of exile as a spaceof in-between-ness and borders. Lastly, the third section discusses temporality as it relates to thespace of exile. Through the analysis of Mendieta’s Siluetas, and in light of phenomenologicalaccounts of space and the works of Anzaldua and Mignolo, Ana Mendieta herself is disclosedas well as the space characteristic of those who can no longer be said to have a “home.”

My exploration through my art of the relationship between myself and naturehas been a clear result of my having been torn from my homeland during myadolescence. The making of my Silueta in nature keeps (makes) the transitionbetween my homeland and my new home. It is a way of reclaiming my rootsand becoming one with nature. Although the culture in which I live is part ofme, my roots and cultural identity are a result of my Cuban heritage.1

Ana Mendieta

Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets writeand artists create.2

Gloria Anzaldua

There are spaces of belonging, of fitting in, of confrontation, of forgetting, spaces thatcan be measured and analyzed, clear, definite spaces where we know who we are andwhy we are there. If we pay attention, we will see the boundaries in these spaces, thewalls of the rooms, the ceiling with the beautiful mural or the threatening chandelier atits center. But, for the most part, it is not a matter of being aware, or of calculating our

ISSN 1090-3771 print/ISSN 1472-7242 online/04/010025-17 ! 2004 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1090377042000196001

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Figure 1. Ana Mendieta. Silueta Works in Iowa, 1976–1978/1991. Color photograph documenting earth/body work,Iowa. Courtesy of the Estate of Ana Mendieta and Galerie Lelong, New York.

steps so that we will not trip or run into the wall. One of the features of our being,Heidegger says, is that we ourselves “make room,” “give space,” and “let entities withinthe world be encountered.”3 In other words, we ourselves are spatial. Thus, we cannottalk of space without talking about us, and we cannot talk about us without talkingabout space. Tetsuro Watsuji thus claimed that we discover ourselves in “climate,” aclimate permeated by space, time, and history.4

To look at Ana Mendieta’s photographs of her Siluetas Series is to be taken bothto the representational space of a work of art and also to the space which claims bothpresence and absence, a space perhaps fueled by the nostalgia of those who experienceexile.5 To experience those spaces is to experience Ana Mendieta, the Cuban exile, andthose who have nostalgia, “home-sickness,” for an imagined land of belonging. Keepingin mind Heidegger and Watsuji, we follow Mendieta’s spaces, where race, sex, history,

EXILED SPACE, IN-BETWEEN SPACE 27

and longing converge to offer a picture of Mendieta herself and of those who, like her,inhabit the space of exile, a space that can be seen as yet another nepantla or“in-between” where identities are negotiated, modified, and sometimes transformed.6

Section One offers an analysis of existential spatiality as conceived by bothHeidegger and Watsuji and provides a discussion of how such spatiality can be seen inMendieta’s Siluetas. Section Two questions whether or not the space represented byMendieta is properly defined as a space that is in-between. The relevant questions hereare: 1) Is the space of the exile the space of the in-between?, and, 2) Is the space of theexile analogous to that of the borders? The work of Anzaldua and Mignolo informs thisdiscussion.7 Finally, Section Three analyzes an element that cannot be separated fromspatiality—temporality. In opposition to Heidegger’s prioritization of time over space inworks like Being and Time, this discussion shows the interrelatedness of the two andprovides an analysis of the temporality of the exile. In the end, through the analysis ofMendieta’s Siluetas in light of phenomenological accounts of space and the works oftheorists like Anzaldua and Mignolo, the essay shows that space is not neutral to color,identity, nationality, gender, or history. We who have color, identity, nationality, gender,and history are spatial and space is of us.

Existential Spatiality

According to the Heideggerian analysis of the human being, which he calls theExistential Analytic, human beings are spatial with regard to their “being-in-the-world.”Without going into a lengthy explanation of what the Heideggerian view of being-in-the-world is, it is possible to see some of the main features of the Heideggerian view of spacein relation to human beings. Such an account, coupled with Watsuji’s observationsabout the relationship between humans and space, is the basis of what I refer to asexistential spatiality, the view that space is not merely an objective, geometric space tobe measured quantitatively, that may be considered independent of the human beingswho inhabit it. Rather, existential spatiality constitutes a notion of space which isintimately linked to human beings, so much so that it would not make sense to talkabout space without considering how it is connected to us.

Heidegger himself goes so far as to claim that space is dependent on human beings.Such a claim does not come as a surprise if one is aware of the philosophical treatmentof the notion of space and Kant’s famous claim that space is in fact a form of intuition.While not completely removed from the Kantian treatment of space, Heidegger offersa different explanation of space in so far as it takes into consideration the so-calledexistential characteristics of human beings. Watsuji, following and elaborating uponHeidegger, also emphasizes this interrelatedness between spatiality and human beings.It is this connection between space and the existential characteristics of humans that Iwill emphasize here in order to show how Ana Mendieta’s work can be seen asrepresenting an existential space that points to Mendieta’s own life and to those, wholike her, live in-between.

In what sense, then, is space connected to human beings, or even dependent onthem? At the most basic level, there is a relationship between human beings and spacein so far as human beings have, according to Heidegger, the type of being that “abolishesdistance” or has “de-severance” [Entfernung].”8 To abolish distance, to “make thefarness vanish” or “to bring something close by,” as Heidegger also describes ourde-severance, is simply our ability to put something to use as equipment, to move aboutin the world and to understand what is in this world by using it (as equipment or as

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something that is “ready-to-hand”) without having to reflect upon or be thematic aboutit. Obvious examples are our navigating in the world in such a way that we are able topick up objects (whether pencils, cups, or hammers) and know how to use them. We canalso think of the street, which Heidegger sees as “equipment for walking.”9

Connected to de-severance, our ability to bring things close, is the way in which weactually find ourselves in the world. In analyzing the being-in of “being-in-the-world,”Heidegger explains that human beings are in the world in a completely different waythan pencils, cups or hammers.10 A pencil is in a box in a completely different way thanyou or I are in a room. While the pencil merely takes up space in the box, I am in thisroom as a professor, a researcher; this room is not merely four walls, a ceiling and a floorthat can be measured, but the place wherein I can live and carry out my tasks, desires,and goals.

Our de-severance and our being-in-the-world are consequently characteristics ofhuman beings that point to an intimate connection between space and us. Space isencountered as a “region” where we can use objects as equipment. Heidegger claimsthat “Space is not in the subject, nor is the world in space. Space is rather ‘in’ the worldin so far as space has been disclosed by that Being-in-the-world which is constitutive forDasein.”11 Space is dependent on us in so far as we can disclose it in our everydaydealings with the world or in so far as it is disclosed to us by our everyday dealings inthe world.

For Watsuji, who read Heidegger’s account and agreed with many Heideggerianclaims, the connection is even more intimate than Heidegger explains. In his work, AClimate, a Philosophical Study, Watsuji questions the Heideggerian analysis in which timeis the basic existential structure, and claims that space should have been given the sameimportance.12 In his view, human beings are inexorably linked to space in the sense thatwe find ourselves in climate. He appropriates the Heideggerian account in whichhumans are connected to space by way of a region, a space where we can use things astools or equipment, but he adds that our own aims and necessities—that which theequipment is directed towards—are themselves dependent on climate. He writes:

Climate is seen to be the factor by which self-active human being can be madeobjective. Climactic phenomena show man how to discover himself as“standing outside” (i.e. existere) … The essential character of the tool lies in itsbeing “for a purpose” … Now this purpose-relation derives from human lifeand at its basis we find the climatic limitations of human life. Shoes may be forwalking, but the great majority of mankind could walk without them; it israther cold and heat that makes shoes necessary. Clothes are to be worn, yetthey are worn above all as a protection against cold. Thus this purpose-relationfinds its final origin in climatic self-comprehension.13

Thus, we cannot think of human beings independently of the space and climate in whichthey find themselves.

Thinking along with Heidegger and Watsuji directs us to see the interdependenceof human beings and space, whether in the sense that human beings disclose regions ofspace or whether space and climate allow us to find ourselves. The question that comesto mind, then, is what space does Ana Mendieta disclose through her art? In otherwords, what does Mendieta bring close with her art? Who or what is disclosed by herart?


Figure 2. Ana Mendieta. Untitled (from the Silueta Series), August 1978. Grass silueta, Iowa. Courtesy of theEstate of Ana Mendieta and Galerie Lelong, New York.

The Siluetas

If we look at the art of this Cuban-born artist who at 13 emigrated to the US as one ofthe “Peter-Pan kids,” we see photographs of her various performances on such materialsas earth, sand, and water.14 Included in her work are fire, twigs, dry leaves, mud,gunpowder, flowers, trees, bamboo, cloth, and blood, all surrounding, accompanying,erasing, covering, and disclosing Mendieta’s own five-foot silhouette. It is the spacerepresented in these works that I will discuss in light of the notion of existentialspatiality.

Mendieta’s silhouettes sit calmly and eerily on grass, sand, earth, snow, tree trunks,and in the middle of a pond, suggesting the dichotomies of subject and object, presenceand absence while at the same time overcoming them. Let’s take for example Mendieta’ssilhouette on the grass (Figure 2). It is barely there; it can be missed if one does not payattention. It points to Mendieta as a subject in so far as Mendieta is a human being whohas made the work but it also points to her as an object in so far as her very silhouetteis an object of art also represented by photographic means. Nevertheless, this work ofart also problematizes the sharp dichotomy between subject and object, precisely bydisclosing a space where it is not clear whether Mendieta is subject or object.

Mendieta creates a space where there are blades of grass which are and are not her.She is there by way of her silhouette and yet she is not there because there is only hersilhouette. The sense of absence is heightened by the feeling that the wind could makethe silhouette disappear. This is a characteristic that can be found in most of thesilhouettes, since Mendieta chooses to make her silhouettes in places where theirdisappearance is only a matter of time. The silhouette done on the sand at the beach is

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erased by the waves; and the silhouette made of mud in the middle of the pond willslowly sink. As Raine puts it when commenting on the form found in the Siluetas,

Its boundaries are vague and subject to immanent dissolution: at any moment,the flowers will scatter or decompose, the mud or sand will wash away, theflames will burn out, the figure will come to life and spirit itself out of theframe—or a second glance will reveal what appeared to be a human form as amomentary trick of light and shadow, a self-projection onto a chance formationof earth or wood.”15

Thus, when encountering or seeing these silhouettes, one can get a sense of this absenceand of Mendieta’s presence and can go back and forth between this absence andpresence. In the end, however, neither definite absence nor definite presence defines thespace, only presence in absence and vice versa.

If we follow Heidegger’s insights on the interrelatedness between space and self andconsider Mendieta’s Siluetas, we observe that the space Mendieta shapes is deeplydependent on her own being-in the world in the way described above. That space thatblurs subject and object, presence and absence is there because of the way in whichMendieta lives or exists in the world. Her deseverance and being-in disclose or bring tolight space. As we have seen, deseverance deals with bringing close in the sense thatwhen we are in the world we find objects that are of use to us. But what is Mendietabringing close? The leaves of grass, the sand, and the stones are of use to Mendieta, yetthe result does not seem to be the one that Heidegger anticipates—that a region ofequipmentality will be available and with it a familiar world discovered.

While one can say that Mendieta uses grass, sand, and stones as things of use inorder to create her art, it is not the case that the space that has been disclosed is oneof familiarity. Rather, it is a space that, in its familiarity, also evokes what is uncanny[unheimlich], something deeply disturbing that leads us to question our being in theworld. It obscures the sense of belonging to the world that, according to Heidegger, isdeeply connected to our ability to use the objects that we find in the world asequipment.16 Perhaps at that moment in which her skin touches the elements, Mendietaherself feels united to the earth. Yet as she leaves the site of her work and leaves hersilhouette, she creates a space that leads us to question her very existence and place inthe world and perhaps all of our existences.

The space that she has disclosed, however, is dependent on the way in which sheis in the world. One important aspect of Mendieta’s life, and of her art as she herselfclaimed, was her condition of exile. That space disclosed by way of her silhouettes hasbeen described as blurring the dichotomies of subject and object, presence and absence,and as disclosing both the familiar and the uncanny, that which is not like home. Thiselement is crucial in understanding the space that Mendieta’s artworks disclose.Although commentaries on Mendieta’s work are few, many of them address hercondition of exile and the deeply personal nature of her work. It is not my intention tomake a claim about which aspect of Mendieta’s life is the most important inspiration forher art. Rather, I take into consideration what Mendieta herself said about herexile—that having been torn from her homeland is what led her to carry out a dialoguebetween earth and the female form—and bring to light the “space of exile” or “exiledspace” that is disclosed through her art.

It might well be that the sense of non-belonging that she felt as an exile is whatfueled her art and allowed her to make a statement not just about herself and otherexiles but about the human condition. For example, Perrault states,


Mendieta saw the earth as a living body, and she wanted to be one with thatbody. Nevertheless, the tragic sense of exile that informs her artwork suggeststhe separateness from nature and spirit that is almost the definition of modernlife. Mendieta’s art tries to overcome this separation, and it is this, not someformal strategy, that accounts for the power of her body of work, for we are allin exile.17

It might also be the case that her condition as an exile is one of her inspirations, but thatissues such as race, gender, and nationality are at work in her earth and body art. Forexample, Blocker is careful to point out that she does not want to see Mendieta’s workas representing exile only as a lack of location and in terms of loss, sorrow, and personaltrauma. Rather, she explains Mendieta as using exile as “a discursive position fromwhich to create her art” in order to “interrogate nationality, color, ethnicity, andgender.” She states, “Exile, here, refers not so much to her lived experience of nationaldisplacement as to a staged identity to which we become witness.”18 Whatever the casemay be, it is important, as Rain and Blocker point out, that we don’t romanticizeMendieta’s condition of exile, of not having a “home,” lest we fall in the trap of thinkingthat identity is fixed.19

Not having a “home,” whether home is seen as a fully defined state which evokesan established, homogeneous community, or a state in the process of being made, issomething bound to lead to anxiety, nostalgia, and longing. “Home” is the place fromwhich I was torn away, where I belong, where I can be myself, and where I can, for themost part, be understood. The exile is somehow always looking for it, imagining it, orusing it as a standard by which to measure her present life. She may be completelywrong about what it is or what it has become, but even in the painful moments ofawareness in which she may be idealizing this home, it is still something that informs herexperience.

Mendieta holds on to her condition of exile and produces art that both points to,and reunites her, with the earth, the latter being the symbol of her “home.”20 Theabsence in the work points both to her absence and the absence of a place that can behome. This sense of the uncanny that is present in the space that Mendieta representscan be understood as the lack of home, even when some of the most familiar elements,earth, fire, sand, mud, are present.21 One of the most notable silhouettes, Isla, can beseen as an example of the ubiquity of exile in her work (see Figure 3, on next page).

“Isla” points to a space that is both Mendieta herself and Cuba, her home. At thesame time, the mud is really just mud that is not really Mendieta or Cuba. And eventhe space that Mendieta discloses is obscured by the fact that what we are looking at isonly a photograph. Despite this dependence on photography, however, we can stillexperience the space that Mendieta discloses or lets us get close to. And it is in thisspace that she discloses the earth and the world. The Mendieta that is disclosed in thisspace is the human being in search of a home.

In his later musings about art, Heidegger analyzes the work of art and claims thatsuch work “sets up a world” and “sets-forth” the earth.22 While still holding on to hisearly views about the interrelatedness between self and world, and to the importance ofthe human being as the being that discloses the world, Heidegger discusses the role thatthe artist has in this world-disclosure. No longer does he emphasize the importance ofthe self as disclosing a world of equipmentality. Instead, he appeals to the “opening up”of a human being such that, in that openness, being can be disclosed. The artist, then,can be thought of as the medium through which a world is set up and the earth is

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Figure 3. Ana Mendieta. Untitled (from the Silueta Series), August 1978. Mud silueta, Iowa. Courtesy of the Estateof Ana Mendieta and Galerie Lelong, New York.

set-forth. Paradoxically, according to Heidegger, the earth is disclosed as that which is“self-secluded.” He states,

Color shines and wants only to shine. When we analyze it in rational terms bymeasuring its wavelengths, it is gone. It shows itself only when it remainsundisclosed and unexplained. Earth thus shatters every attempt to penetrateinto it … The earth appears openly cleared as itself only when it is perceivedand preserved as that which is by nature undisclosable … To set forth the earthmeans to bring it into the Open as the self-secluding.23

We can say that Mendieta’s Siluetas disclose the earth in such a way that it is alwayshidden, not necessarily in the same way that Heidegger suggests, but in the sense thatit is hidden as one is no longer there, and we can also say that the Siluetas disclose aworld that for the exile is and is not always there.

Exiled Space, In-between Space?

The earth in Mendieta’s Siluetas stands as a symbol of the country that she lost and ofthe country that she finds herself in, both of which are present and absent. Mendietaherself is and is not in these spaces, as the silueta above shows. The Mendieta made offlowers is slowly being washed away by the sea, leaving only her torso, as if it had beencut in two. She is in-between, not quite on the sand or on the water anymore. She dwellsin that space that is of both water and sand. It is this space of in-between-ness, as Ichoose to characterize the space of the exile, that this section analyzes. One of the


Figure 4. Ana Mendieta. Untitled (from the Silueta Series), July 1976. Red flowers silueta on sand, Mexico.Courtesy of the Estate of Ana Mendieta and Galerie Lelong, New York.

central questions here is whether such a space is analogous to the “border-space”theorized by writers such as Anzaldua and Mignolo.

Following Blocker, I see the space that Mendieta discloses as a liminal space, aspace of the in-between. According to Blocker, this space created by Mendieta points tothe performativity of her exile. As she says,

By engaging the contradictions of identificatory practice relative to the female,the primitive, the earth, and nation, Mendieta occupies the discursive positionof exile, and she uses this position to produce in us a sense of the uncanny. She

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uses, in other words, exile performatively to question the limits and fixity ofidentity.24

In other words, Mendieta’s work is read not simply as representative of the longing ofthe exile but as a more complicated performance which aims at displacing the idea thatidentity, whether national, sexual, or personal, is fixed. As Rogoff puts it, “Geographiesand their signification thus emerge not as the site of secure and coherent identities butrather as those of disruptive interventions in the historical narratives of culture.”25 WhileI agree with these claims about the importance of the performative in Mendieta’s workand its movement away from notions of identity and fixity, I still think that Mendieta’sown experience as an exile is of great importance and is key in her disclosure of thespace of the in-between. Mendieta’s own in-between-ness is both cause and effect of herartistic creation.

This space can be understood in two ways, as a metaphoric or symbolic theoreticalspace, or as an actual, geographic space (in the negative sense if one is referring to exile).Looking at the former, the way in which spatiality is construed as pertaining to thesymbolic and the metaphoric, leads me to make a connection with “border theorizing”or border thinking. Here I would like to suggest that being in the space of exile is parallelto being in the space of the borderlands in the sense that Anzaldua speaks of. Eventhough there are important differences when considering exile and borderlands, mostimportantly the fact that there are cases in which the exile may not return to the“homeland” whereas the border citizen may visit both sides of the border, there are stillsignificant points of similarity.

One of these points is that the space of exile is one of both presence and absence.We have seen how Mendieta’s work clearly represents this sense of being neither herenor there, but perhaps in one or both places. While describing her experience of beinga Chicana in a white-dominated society and a lesbian in a heterosexual-dominatedsociety, Anzaldua sees herself as caught in the borderlands where she is “half and half,”the “new mestiza,” and “caught in between worlds.” In being caught in between worlds,she is not fully in the white world or the heterosexual world, and yet has to inhabit theseworlds as they are the dominant ones. She is in these worlds and yet she is not therebecause she doesn’t belong. Yet, she also says that her mestiza consciousness allows herto be “at both shores at once.”26 While Mendieta could not literally be at both shoresat once and could not even be on both shores since it was not possible for her to go backto her country, she was still in Cuba by way of her memory of it and by the way in whichthe notion or construct of “home” played a role in her life, as if “dragging the old skinalong … dragging the ghost of the past.”27 The exile and the border-dweller, then, livein the space of absence and presence, which can also be thought as a “third” space orperspective.28

The second element that is shared by the experience of being in the space of exileand the space of the borderlands is the experience of the uncanny, or that which is “notlike home.” Although some interpreters understand this characteristic in terms of aFreudian analysis, I choose to see it in more mundane terms. We have seen that theuncanny that is brought to light by Mendieta’s work has to do with the sense thatfamiliar elements such as earth, sand, water, and fire can be arranged in such a way togive us a sense of the unfamiliar. For example, when we look at a photograph depictingMendieta’s silhouette, we cannot understand exactly what is going on, and we feeluneasy and disturbed. Whether we will all get this feeling is not clear and the reason whywe get it may be due to the interplay of the elements, the displacement of subject and


object, presence and absence, or it due to a completely different cause. Here, however,I suggest that Mendieta effectively handles the elements to create a space whichdisplaces familiar dichotomies. This displacement may be the cause of our sense of theuncanny when we experience her art. After all, fixity seems to be one of our mostcherished ideals.

For Anzaldua, it is this experience of not having a fixed identity that is demandedfrom certain groups in society that leads to a state of “intimate terrorism” or “psychicunrest.” However, she also sees the inhabiting of the borderlands as an opportunity. Shestates,

So, don’t give me your tenets and your laws. Don’t give me your lukewarmgods. What I want is an accounting with all three cultures—white, Mexican,Indian. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch thebleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if goinghome is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a newculture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortarand my own feminist architecture.29

She sees the experience of the borderlands as an opportunity in which we can forge anew kind of consciousness that will be able to deal with contradictions and inconsisten-cies and that will be able to gain creative impetus even though it is also plagued by pain,fear, doubt, and longing. This is her “mestiza consciousness” whose work is “to breakdown the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh andthrough the images in her work how duality is transcended.”30 Is Mendieta’s conscious-ness a mestiza consciousness? Is her work that very work that Anzaldua so vividlydescribes?

Anzaldua points to the interrelatedness of life and art when she discusses the act ofwriting and claims that the psychic unrest of living in the borderlands is fuel for artisticcreation. This psychic unrest, she says,

is like a cactus needle embedded in the flesh. It worries itself deeper anddeeper, and I keep aggravating it by poking at it. When it begins to fester I haveto do something to put an end to the aggravation and to figure out why I haveit. I get deep down into the place where it’s rooted in my skin and pluck awayat it, playing it like a musical instrument—the fingers pressing, making the painworse before it can get better. Then out it comes … That’s what writing is forme, an endless cycle of making it worse, making it better, but always makingmeaning out of the experience, whatever it may be.31

For Anzaldua creating is painful as well as transformative, both of oneself and of matter,whether it is ink, paper, paint, or mud, grass, and sand (as in Mendieta’s art). It involvesblocks, being paralyzed, but also surges of energy, understanding, or release. Throughher art, through her performances of her silhouette, Mendieta, like Anzaldua, bothpresses and plucks those cactus needles that represent the difficult, contradictory life ofin-between-ness. Here life and creation go hand in hand; mestiza consciousness andcreativity converge to disclose the space of exile or of the in-between.

This space is disclosed by Mendieta the artist. Yet, as we have seen, the artistherself is disclosed in this space. Like Anzaldua, Watsuji links the self’s artistic creationwith the space that one inhabits. Although he ultimately overemphasizes the linkbetween one’s character and climate and space, he nevertheless reminds us of the

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Figure 5. Ana Mendieta. Silueta Work (Anima, Alma Silueta en Fuego), October 1975. Cloth and gunpowdersilueta, Iowa. Courtesy of the Estate of Ana Mendieta and Galerie Lelong, New York.

intimate connection that there is between art and climate, between a self’s artisticdevelopment and her space.32 As he states,

Just as place characteristics signify characteristics of spiritual make-up, so alsodo they signify artistic characteristics and, hence, those of the imaginativepower of the artist.33

Mendieta’s imaginative power then, can be seen as intimately linked to her living inIowa and her having been uprooted from her native land, Cuba. Just thinking of thedifferences in climate in Iowa and Cuba (as well as the climate of the other sites that shechose to perform her silhouettes) leads one to wonder to what extent Mendieta wasaffected by this and to what extent her art is dependent on it. Although one cannot saythat her art is a direct result of her interaction with her space, one can say, along withWatsuji, that her creativity was deeply influenced by her experience of space as well asthe elements.

As we have seen, Mendieta’s disclosure of this space of exile, of in-between-nessand of borderlands, that is deeply dependent on a life lived in different spaces anddifferent climates yields a symbolic or metaphorical space where we can “theorize”about exilic or border issues. Mignolo traces different instances of what he calls “borderthinking,” which he sees as:

thinking from dichotomous concepts rather than ordering the world in dichotomies.Border thinking, in other words, is logically, a dichotomous locus of enuncia-tion and, historically, is located at the borders (interiors or exteriors) of themodern/colonial world system.34

While Mignolo is deeply interested in taking into account particular local histories of


particular geopolitical spaces as well as the complexities of these histories, since they arenot linear, he is also interested in the epistemological consequences brought about byborder thinking. That is, Mignolo’s vision of the borders is deeply dependent on thetheoretical spaces opened by border thinking. Such a space, he claims, will allow us torecognize the difference between accounts of the colonial difference that, while criticalof colonialism, are still permeated by it.

Anzaldua’s and Mignolo’s understandings of border thinking serve as examples ofthe importance of the theoretical space of exile and the borderlands. One must becareful, however, not to treat this space as primarily a theoretical space in which we canplug in any and all of our ambiguities and which results in a homogenization of the verypeople that are being described as heterogeneous. In clinging to the “new mestiza” andtheorizing about her as the example of the being that is not a unified subject, and byseeing her as our new model, we may in fact romanticize her and her condition, thusmissing the reasons why people like Anzaldua write about the borderlands in the firstplace.35 It is possible that there may be a “colonializing” appropriation of the “newmestiza,” leading us to think that after Anzaldua’s writings (as well as the work of writerssuch as Chela Sandoval and Cherrie Moraga), we have an understanding of who thesepeople are and how they are to be treated. We might even leave thinking that eventhough we are not all Chicanos, we are all new mestizos much in the same way thatAnzaldua describes, or that we are all exiles given our condition in modernity (as wehave seen in the case of Perreault’s interpretation).

Yet, the work of Anzaldua, although pointing to the theoretical underpinnings ofthe space of the borderlands, comes from a very specific, material site and condition,just as the work of Mendieta comes from the very specific experience of someone whowas forced to abandon her homeland, Cuba, and to live in Iowa where she was “lookedas an erotic being (myth of the hot Latin), aggressive, and sort of evil.”36 It is from thesespecific positions that Anzaldua and Mendieta produce their work and it is from thesespecific positions that their work should be understood. Although we cannot claim suchpositions, we need to be aware of them when we interpret their creative works. Even I,whose main inspiration to write about Mendieta was my own experience of exile, cannotfully understand Mendieta’s positionality. I can acknowledge it, try to understand it, andcompare it to my own experience.

It is compelling that the space of the exile and in-between-ness can be disclosedthrough art. Mendieta’s artworks, as well as Anzaldua’s writing, are indeed powerfuldisclosures of such a space.

Conclusion

To conclude, I would like to revisit Heidegger’s and Watsuji’s insights about theinterrelatedness between space and self, and the view of existential spatiality derivedfrom their work. In his early work, Heidegger emphasizes the relationship between spaceand the equipmentality of the things that are in it, thus claiming that human beingsdisclose regions of space in which we can use things as equipment. Such regions wouldnot be possible if there were no human beings who have goals or desires towards whichequipmentality is directed. Watsuji sees spatiality (together with temporality) as one ofthe basic structures of human beings that not only directs equipmentality but also

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discloses us to ourselves. Such spatiality is conceived in terms of its climate and theimportance that climate has in our lives.

If we keep Watsuji’s claims in mind, it is possible to avoid some of the pitfallsregarding the conception of the space of the exile or the in-between as a symbolic,metaphoric, theoretical space that follow from analyses such as Anzaldua’s andMignolo’s. The pitfall is the forgetting of the specific sites, locations, and geographicpositions that inform the theorists or artists of the in-between, and thus characterizingthem in a general way that leads to their homogenization, to claims that they can beclearly understood, and to claims that in the end we are all like them. From Heideggerwe learn the importance that our goals and aims have in the conceptualization of space.Yet we do not learn about how these very goals and aims are deeply connected toclimate. It is Watsuji who introduces this element, thus creating an indissolubleconnection between space and self. If we take this connection seriously, we are led notto forget the specific space that Mendieta comes from, and out of which her own selfis disclosed.

The space that Watsuji sees as a basic existential structure of human beings is alsoinevitably tied to time:

Here the space- and time-structure of human existence is revealed as climateand history: the inseparability of time and space is the basis of the inseparabil-ity of history and climate. No social formation could exist if it lacked allfoundation in the space-structure of man, nor does time become history unlessit is founded in such social being, for history is the structure of existence insociety. … it is from the union of climate with history that the latter gets itsflesh and bones.37

Space and time are interrelated; we occupy spaces that have specific climates that informour specific histories.

This temporal, historical aspect of space can also be seen in Mendieta’s Siluetas. Itis represented not only by the fact that each silhouette is placed in a space where onecan capture the passage of time by way of the disappearing silhouette, such as when itis washed away by the sea or burned by the flames, but also by the very fact thatMendieta herself executes a series of silhouettes, which can all be accessed throughphotographs. The photographs, however, fix time, and we can only imagine the futurethat is to come for Mendieta’s silhouettes. The temporality of her work is best capturedin the various videos of her performances.38

When Mendieta is finally able to return to the earth, to her homeland, she producesa series entitled Esculturas Rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures), which is based on acombination of her silhouette and Cuban mythology, and are considered “the mostexplicit example of sexual identity and cultural identity.”39 The titles of the large worksare in Taino, a language of an indigenous group in Cuba, and connect Mendieta to hermotherland. Importantly, these works are carved on stone to remain there through thepassage of time. Before her early and tragic death, Mendieta was able to inscribe herselfin the Cuban landscape, to make her mark on rock and thus perhaps to find herself, toshow herself as a Cuban in Cuba and to return home.40 Yet, we know that this is toosimplistic an explanation that would carve the space of the exile or in-between-ness asone that can be conquered by a return home and that would appeal to the notion ofhome as fixed. We know better.

The temporality that accompanies space is not so easily tracked or explained. It isnot the sequence of nows that has had priority in our theorizing since Aristotle. As


Figure 6. Ana Mendieta. View of Cueva de Aguila. Rupestrian Sculptures: Untitled, Atabey, Untitled, Untitled[Guanaroca (First Woman)] 1981. Carved cave walls executed at Escaleras de Jaruco, Jaruco State Park, Havana,

Cuba. Courtesy of the Estate of Ana Mendieta and Galerie Lelong, New York.

Heidegger explains, it is “a unity of a future which makes present in the process ofhaving been.”41 In other words, the present, past, and future are interrelated and wecannot think of the present without taking into consideration our past history and ourprojects or aims for the future. Mendieta does not capture the definitive “now” in whichshe finally returns home and can be at peace. She points toward the future not only bydeveloping another series of works before her death, but also by continuing to disclosethe space of the exile, of the in-between, and its relation to self and time through herSiluetas even as she is no longer present.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Ronald Sundstrom and Nicolas Leon for insightful comments andsuggestions and to Robin Park from Galerie Lelong, New York.

Notes

1. As quoted in Gloria Moure, Ana Mendieta (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A., 1996), 108.2. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands La Frontera, The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 73.3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper

& Row, 1962), Sections 22–24.4. Tetsuro Watsuji, Climate and Culture, A Philosophical Study, trans. Geoffrey Bownas (New York:

Greenwood Press, 1961), 9. See also Tetsuro Watsuji, Watsuji Tetsuro’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan, trans.Yamamoto Seisaku and Robert E. Carter (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), Chap. 9. Watsuji distinguishesbetween climate and environment. He sees climate not as equivalent to natural environment but ratheras an element of the structure of human existence.

5. I do not wish to claim that Mendieta’s work is solely driven by the nostalgia characteristic of the exile, anostalgia which many times longs for a fixed positionality. See Irit Rogoff, “The Discourse of Exile,

40 M. ORTEGA

Geographies and Representations of Identity,” Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts, July (1989): 72,where she claims that “There is little nostalgia or illusion about the recuperation of previous culturalcoherencies in any aspect of Mendieta’s work.” I think that nostalgia does play a role in Mendieta’sartworks in the sense that it is part of her life and consequently informs her creativity. It is a different issuewhether the actual work produced points to a final, acquired destination that can finally provide comfort.

6. “Nepantla” is a Nahuatl word meaning “place in the middle,” or “in-between,” space.7. Anzaldua, Borderlands and Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, Coloniality, Subaltern Knowl-

edges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).8. Heidegger, Being and Time, 139[105].9. Recall Heidegger’s insistence that being-in-the-world has to do with a non-thematic awareness of the

world. In other words, Heidegger describes our relationship to the world in terms of our non-reflectiveunderstanding of the world. He does not deny that we also have reflective understanding, but he sees thislatter understanding as dependent on our day-to-day non-reflective understanding. See Heidegger, Beingand Time, Sections 12–13.

10. Heidegger, Being and Time, 79[54].11. Heidegger, Being and Time, 146[111].12. Recall that Heidegger sees all existentialia or existential characteristics as “equiprimordial” or having the

same importance, with the exception of temporality. See Heidegger, Being and Time, Division II,375[327], where he states that “The primordial unity of the structure of care lies in temporality.”

13. Watsuji, Climate and Culture, 13.14. “Peter-Pan kids” refers to the children from the 1960s “Pedro Pan Operacion” in which almost 14,000

Cuban children were sent from Cuba to foster homes in the US in order to protect them from beingsocialized by Castro’s system and from the imminent war (Bay of Pigs Invasion). Ana and her sister,Raquel, were sent to Iowa in 1961. For an interesting discussion of issues of racism related to Mendieta’smove to Iowa and issues of the significance of “earth” in Mendieta’s work see Jane Blocker, Where is AnaMendieta?, Identity, Performativity, and Exile (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), Chapter 2.

15. Anne Raine, “Embodied Geographies: Subjectivity and Materiality in the Work of Ana Mendieta,” inGenerations & Geographies in the Visual Arts, Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock (London: Routledge,1996), 239.

16. This is an important observation when considering how well Heideggerian phenomenology does or doesnot explain the lived experiences of beings who are multicultural. It suggests that certain revisions needto be made to the Heideggerian account given the experiences of these selves. I discuss this issue in moredetail in “‘New Mestizas,’ ‘World-travelers,’ and ‘Dasein’: Phenomenology and the Multi-Voiced,Multi-cultural Self,” Hypatia, 16, no. 3 (2001): 1–29.

17. John Perrault, “Earth and Fire,” in Ana Mendieta, A Retrospective, guest curators, Petra Barreras del Rioand John Perreault (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987), 14.

18. Blocker, Where’s Ana Mendieta?, 27.19. See Raine, “Embodied Geographies,” 236 and Blocker, Where’s Ana Mendieta?, Chap. 3.20. See Blocker’s interesting discussion about how Mendieta’s art works make a connection between earth

and nation even though these are supposed to be opposed categories in Blocker, Where’s Ana Mendieta?,48.

21. For a Freudian interpretation of the “uncanny” see Blocker, Where’s Ana Mendieta?, 75.22. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, and Thought,

trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 43–49.23. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 47.24. Blocker, Where’s Ana Mendieta?, 73.25. Rogoff, “The Discourse of Exile,” 73.26. Anzaldua, Borderlands, 78.27. Anzaldua, Borderlands, 49.28. Anzaldua, Borderlands, 46.29. Anzaldua, Borderlands, 22.30. Anzaldua, Borderlands, 80.31. Anzaldua, Borderlands, 73.32. See Watsuji, Climate and Culture, Chaps. 2 & 3, in which he discusses the characters of human beings that

inhabit monsoon, desert, and meadow climates, and ultimately essentializes the relationship betweencharacter and climate and is subsequently led to affirm the “uniqueness” of the Japanese character.

33. Watsuji, Climate and Culture, 205.


34. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 85. In this text Mignolo also considers what he calls “doublecritique” and “Creolization” as border thinking, as theorized by the Moroccan philosopher AbdelhebirKhatibi and the Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant respectively.

35. I should add here that even Anzaldua herself may be guilty of romanticizing the new mestiza and theelements that are supposed to be part of her heritage. For example, Anzaldua’s use of Indian mythologyis at times indicative of this stance. While it may be that some Chicanos who find themselves in theborderlands feel a connection with their Indian heritage, many might not—in fact, many may feelcompletely unconnected to it and may not be able to forge a connection. This may also be the case forLatinos who recognize the importance of her account of the new mestiza and who feel that she iscapturing their own experience. See Benjamin Alire Saenz, “In the Borderlands of Chicano Identity,” inBorder Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, eds Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1997). See also Debra Castillo and Maria Socorro Tabuenca Cordoba,Border Women, Writing from la frontera (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). In theintroduction to this text, Castillo and Tabuenca Cordoba criticize both Anzaldua and Mignolo forproviding explanations of the borders that are too theoretical and that consequently leave behind the realpeople of the borders, thus creating merely a “floating signifier for a displaced self” (35).

36. Moure, Ana Mendieta, 101. An important element of Mendieta’s work connected to her Cuban heritagewhich I do not discuss here, is her use of Santeria. For an analysis of Santeria in the Siluetas, see MaryJane Jacob, Ana Mendieta The Silueta Series, 1973–1980 (New York: Galerie Lelong, 1991).

37. Watsuji, Climate and Culture, 9–10.38. One can see footage of this video in the 1987 film “Ana Mendieta, Fuego de Tierra” by Kate Horsfield,

Nereyda Garcia-Ferraz, and Branda Miller.39. Moure, Ana Mendieta, 163.40. Mendieta died in 1985. Her husband, the well-known artist Carl Andre, was tried for her death and

acquitted. More commentators have discussed Mendieta’s work after her tragic death, and, unfortunately,as Coco Fusco points out, many “invoked her name as a metaphor for female victimization, transformingher into a contemporary New York vision of Frida Kahlo.” See Coco Fusco, “Displacement: Traces ofAna Mendieta,” Poliester, 4 (1992): 61. However, Mendieta’s work should be appreciated in its own right,not just for its connection with a tragic event. For a discussion of Mendieta’s death and her relationshipwith Andre, see Robert Katz, Naked by the Window: The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990).

41. Heidegger, Being and Time, 374[326].

Note on contributor

Mariana Ortega is Associate Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University, University Heights, Ohio. Herresearch focuses on questions of self and sociality in existential phenomenology, in particular HeideggerianPhenomenology. She is also interested in “U.S. Third World” Feminism, Latin American thought, and RaceTheory.

ortega exiled space in-between space

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