Vestígio e memória lésbica nas entranhas do mundo

O artigo investiga os registros fotográficos de Ana Mendieta, Zanele Muholi e Jade Marra, três mulheres do sul global. Para investigar suas obras partimos das ideias de teóricas feministas terceiro-mundistas como Gloria Anzaldúa e Karina Vergara Sanches. Além de trazermos o pensamento de Silvia Federici, Simone de Beauvoir, Linda Noclin e Roberta Barros para nos auxiliar nas leituras complexas das imagens sobre representação e visibilidade lésbica. Trabalhamos com o conceito de A/r/tografia de Rita Irwin que subverte questões centrais hegemônicas do academicismo branco para a construção de novas epistemologias feministas.

“They Are Always There”

To speak of “Latin America” is to seek a frame of negotiation between those for whom it remains a pragmatic grouping, those who regard it as a psychic and geographic zone of experience, and those for whom it serves little other purpose than as a postcolonial mirage. And it’s certainly true that in the case of artists Ana Mendieta (Cuba, 1948–1985) and Cecilia Vicuña (Chile, b. 1948) a negotiation of zones takes on a particularly haunting mirage. Resisting the alluring and troubling “coherences” of African and Indian postcolonial returns in contemporary art (T. J. Demos, Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art, Sternberg Press, 2013), this paper argues that the zone of Latin America remains decidedly incoherent. The work of Mendieta and Vicuña conjure a cacophony of ghosts through the active resistance of easy conflations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous postcolonial experience. Through examining the hospitality that we must show to ghosts, Derrida’s marranismo reminds us that the guest speaks of a justice to come. In understanding the Latin American experience, this paper argues, the guest and the ghost share more than a phonological likeness.

Redefiniciones: Los Otros góticos

This article addresses a redefinition of the Gothic genre as a “Red Gothic,” a term that I coin to define the visceral traits of literary and artistic productions of the “horror” genre in Latin America. I center on the works of Mariana Enríquez, placing them in dialogue with those of visual artists Ana Mendieta and Teresa Margolles. This is an initial proposal for further discussion on political uses of the Gothic in Latin America. In response to the violence and discrimination produced by different implementations of Neoliberalism in the region, a growing field of artists and writers work with Gothic imagery in a flexible, hybrid way to create new representations of “monsters” and “cannibals.” By looking at feminist critiques on post-humanism and cyborg identities (Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway), I propose that “Red Gothic” embodies those gaps and erasures of different populations that still claim a place in Latin American societies.

Corpo - paisagem:

Trata-se de um estudo sobre identidade e nomadismo na arte contemporânea latino-americana a partir dos registros de performance. Exílio, territórios, deslocamentos e corpo são palavras chave para compreensão da obra Silueta Series (1974), composta por 200 fotografias realizadas em um período de aproximadamente sete anos, pela artista cubana Ana Mendieta (1948-1985). O artigo busca refletir os múltiplos conceitos intrínsecos na obra dessa artista pioneira que traz o corpo feminino como elemento central integrado a paisagem e ao nomadismo, além de questões de gênero, política, identidade e nomadismo que são subjetivamente estabelecidas de maneira atemporal.

The poetic act as an act of resistance in the feminist practice of Ana Mendieta

Between the potential to and the potential not to, according to Giorgio Agamben, there is a process of a creative (poetic) act, as an act of resistance towards the end of one's own completion, in this context analyzed through the work of feminist artist Ana Mendieta. Regarding the (in)completeness, Mendieta?s oeuvre exemplifies a perfect illustration that the disappearance of her art work is a way of communication that resists production of any formal finality, as a process within which the traces of the media used (her own body) also disappear because of the time and circumstances left to nature. The dematerialization of artwork in Mendieta?s case epitomized one of possible aspects of exposing the act of resistance as a realization of a quantum of potential through the event, appearing as a poetics of inoperativity as defined by Agamben and erasing boundaries between the inception and the performativity of the poetic time, a duration that is not limited to one existence or aesthetic phenomenon. In the intersection between early feminist art practices (based on essentialism) and the second wave that relied on anti-essentialism as a new conception, Mendieta's work positioned its own dialectic among the separated feminist views about the use of the female body as a medium.