As we stand in

She created these by making impressions in soil or sand or by modelling them from organic and inorganic materials such as stone, moss, grass, flowers, blood or gunpowder. The artist documented her ephemeral sculptures using photography or Super 8 film and referred to them as earth-body works – an expression of a symbiotic and spiritual connection between the body and nature. 

After her untimely death in 1985 under unexplained circumstances, the artist was initially forgotten. Posthumously, however, she became a symbolic figure for activists demanding a revision of the art canon. Gathering in front of museums, they chanted slogans such as

“Where is Ana Mendieta?”, using the artist, who was much less prominent than her husband Carl Andre, as an example to show the dominance of male artists in museums. It was not until the 1990s that Ana Mendieta’s works were introduced to a wider public and appreciated.

In dialogue with the silverwork of “Daphne” by the Nuremberg goldsmith Abraham Jamnitzer, Ana Mendieta’s two photographs invite reflection. Jamnitzer’s educated contemporaries would have been very familiar with the fate of this ancient mythical figure, as recounted by the Roman poet Ovid: Apollo, driven by desire, pursues the nymph, who in her distress begs her father, the river god Peneus, for help. He then turns her into a laurel bush so that she may escape Apollo’s advances. Emerging from the Daphne goblet, the nymph’s hands, raised high as she flees, are already turning into branches of coral teeth; her transformation into a tree has begun. Ana Mendieta, too, often presents the processes of dissolution, coalescence and transformation in her series. Daphne literally becomes one with nature, and this myth resonates in the work of Mendieta as she symbolically allows her body to become one with the landscape. Her silhouettes appear as the fleeting traces of a body that is no longer graspable, yet remains present – like Daphne after her metamorphosis. The myth of Daphne can also be read here as a story of resistance against male monopolizing. Similarly, Mendieta rejects the male-dominated art canon of her time by working with ephemeral materials and non-commercial media. Her works, rather than attempting monumentality, focus on fragility and a reconnection with earth and origin. As the photograph and the three-dimensional handcrafted object enter a relation, the myth can be reinterpreted: The female figure undergoes metamorphosis not as an escape, but as an act of self-empowerment, as a return to the earth, to history and to her own multi-layered identity.