UC Berkeley

My dissertation project, Disappear, Disappearing: Perceptibilities of Erasure in the Works of Ana Mendieta and Cecilia Vicuña, begins with experiences of disappearing and feeling disappeared that draw together near-silences and ephemeral marks produced in the experience of layered, (neo)colonial forms of perceptual and social effacement. Disappear, Disappearing inquires into how the disappearing lines, ephemeral gestures, and precarious marks made by Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, and Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s act as apertures into these interstices of gendered, racialized and ecological forms of violence. Yet I attend here not to the spectacular or visible registers of violence, but rather those registers that form the silent prerequisites to dominant modes of visibility, operating through discursive and epistemic erasure and negation. These “disappearing” zones are not readily apparent or “perceptible” within dominant regimes of visibility, even as such experiences of violence are palpably embodied, felt, sensed and recalled.

Spending time with Mendieta’s dissolving Silueta series and Cecilia Vicuña’s early arte precario of the 1970’s and early 1980’s, this project brings forward a layered experiential and perceptual field that an otherwise pervasive (neo)colonial gaze persistently projects into nothingness, non-existence, silence, and irrelevance. Working across experiences of exile and displacement across the hemispheric Americas, both Mendieta and Vicuña worked closely and with ternura (tenderness) toward the sites of their temporary installations. The fragmented, vital field of near silences and layered forms of disappearing, brought into contact here by two artists’ careful practices of receptivity with place, site, and minor ephemeral materials, substantializes varied forms of disappearing as durational, textured, lived sites/states to which aesthetic attentiveness can and ought to continually return its attentions in order to register both tactics of vibrant survival and embedded discursive violence. By dilating the experiences of these near-silent erasure-zones, I argue that Mendieta and Vicuña both reveal and theorize neglected perceptual landscapes upon which dominant orders of “visibility” depend in order for “something” to be brought into perception.

As these artists spend time with near silences—and as I spend time with their works—I seek to bring forward the notion that erasure and imperceptibility—when understood as affecting those marked-and-effaced by racialized, gendered and ecological forms of precarity and erasure— far from marking an absence or limit of perception, open sites where entire universes of lives and communities take place.

Offering a critical theoretical account of Mendieta and Vicuña’s works that treats their work as a form of intellectual research, this project contributes to the nascent fields of Latinx, Latin American and Hemispheric Visual Studies, particularly attending to the decolonial and feminist energies and interventions emanating from Mendieta and Vicuña’s practices and writings. At the same time, the project attends not only to the huecos or holes in the study of feminist and radical women in Latinx and Latin American arts as critical to studies of arts and aesthetic theory more broadly, but also—inverting the order of compartmentalized knowledge—suggests that Mendieta and Vicuña, as artists-theorists, make palpable far more vast, forceful erasures at work that implicate entire epistemological and socio-political fabrics of negation.