After Nature: The Expanded Landscapes of Ana Mendieta and Ana Vaz

The article explores women’s interventions into landscape through the experimental practices of Cuban American multimedia artist Ana Mendieta and contemporary Brazilian visual artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz. Interested in the material and metaphorical intersections among film, landscape, and geology,...

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Main Author: Marta
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Milano University Press 2020-03-01
Series:Cinéma & Cie
Online Access:https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/view/16171
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author Marta
author_facet Marta
author_sort Marta
collection DOAJ
description The article explores women’s interventions into landscape through the experimental practices of Cuban American multimedia artist Ana Mendieta and contemporary Brazilian visual artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz. Interested in the material and metaphorical intersections among film, landscape, and geology, I focus on the geological imagination of landscape partaking in Mendieta’s and Vaz’s art while asking what sorts of aesthetic regimes and formal strategies they choose to express it. Mendieta’s comprehension of earth as matter, medium, and a deep surface for inscription of traces comments on the materiality of film as a recording medium from the point of view of geologically oriented art. Vaz’s landscape, inflected with human interventions, emerges as an enormous living medium of memory, linking its exploration to a geological approach and the work of excavation while transforming deep time into what the artist calls ‘cinematographic multiperspectivism’. The article argues that it is the attention to the geological that unites these two artists in their critique of the position of exteriority and of landscape as an object of contemplation. Mendieta and Vaz depart from traditional aesthetics of landscape as a view by moving toward landscape as a network of relations among humans, memories, and times.
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spelling doaj.art-b186e5542a4d49d2be78a423f9a7bd9d2023-03-29T15:14:51ZengMilano University PressCinéma & Cie2036-461X2020-03-012034After Nature: The Expanded Landscapes of Ana Mendieta and Ana VazMarta0Yale University The article explores women’s interventions into landscape through the experimental practices of Cuban American multimedia artist Ana Mendieta and contemporary Brazilian visual artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz. Interested in the material and metaphorical intersections among film, landscape, and geology, I focus on the geological imagination of landscape partaking in Mendieta’s and Vaz’s art while asking what sorts of aesthetic regimes and formal strategies they choose to express it. Mendieta’s comprehension of earth as matter, medium, and a deep surface for inscription of traces comments on the materiality of film as a recording medium from the point of view of geologically oriented art. Vaz’s landscape, inflected with human interventions, emerges as an enormous living medium of memory, linking its exploration to a geological approach and the work of excavation while transforming deep time into what the artist calls ‘cinematographic multiperspectivism’. The article argues that it is the attention to the geological that unites these two artists in their critique of the position of exteriority and of landscape as an object of contemplation. Mendieta and Vaz depart from traditional aesthetics of landscape as a view by moving toward landscape as a network of relations among humans, memories, and times. https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/view/16171
spellingShingle Marta
After Nature: The Expanded Landscapes of Ana Mendieta and Ana Vaz
Cinéma & Cie
title After Nature: The Expanded Landscapes of Ana Mendieta and Ana Vaz
title_full After Nature: The Expanded Landscapes of Ana Mendieta and Ana Vaz
title_fullStr After Nature: The Expanded Landscapes of Ana Mendieta and Ana Vaz
title_full_unstemmed After Nature: The Expanded Landscapes of Ana Mendieta and Ana Vaz
title_short After Nature: The Expanded Landscapes of Ana Mendieta and Ana Vaz
title_sort after nature the expanded landscapes of ana mendieta and ana vaz
url https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/view/16171
work_keys_str_mv AT marta afternaturetheexpandedlandscapesofanamendietaandanavaz