I hadn’t known the story of how Anna’s life had played out; how she had ended up working in the arts and how she had ended up becoming the Anna that I knew. I always saw her as having things figured out.
There are poets and there are composers. In a way, it’s simply about their strategies for producing art and relationship to art making. In another way, it’s an inherent, spiritual quality—housed somewhere between the body and the note.
Like a banner at a rally, or a poster advocating for revolution, the art created by the Yoruba people is meant to have life and to be used, whether that function is practical, didactic, ritual, or all of the above.
Mendieta’s work is a call to neither only empathy nor only imagination; it implicates the audience as both co-agents and co-artists through participation.
They knew the surrounding wilderness like the backs of their hands, or rather, the wilderness and the backs of their hands were continuous, separated by no boundary.
"Watching the latest Beyonce music video, "Mine," directed by Pierre Debusscherre I thought, we do strange things to tell the story of our emotions with our bodies."