MENDIETA COOKIE!

Ana Mendieta Cookie action at the Geffen Contemporary, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles

Silhueta Cookies, baked for you by the Association of Hysteric Curators, in honor of Ana Mendieta

What is a communion? Communion is an exchange in a holy place, a place of worship, or a museum. Here today, we speculate on the divine, we enact a ritual. We eat a piece of bread and take in her body. We give you a blessed Silhueta Cookie to commune with Ana. Her body buried under his flat work: his wife, his other, the absent one. As you consume or carry her, you bring her presence, a muse, into being. May her spirit rise up. May she not be forsaken or forgotten.

“I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source. Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth ... I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body. This obsessive act of reasserting my ties with the earth is really the reactivation of primaeval beliefs ... [in] an omnipresent female force, the after-image of being encompassed within the womb.”-Ana Mendieta

(Quoted in Petra Barreras del Rio and John Perreault, Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York 1988, p.10.)