Santa Muerte

I was up really late last night. Reading, of course, and thinking loads of things.

I stumbled upon an Article in the Tribune about Santa Muerte. And I started making connections between this figure and Ana Mendieta - what I've read in Where is Ana Mendieta? about how her trips to Mexico really impacted her and her work. Last night I also read a military article about How Santa Muerte is the Saint of those individuals on the "Fringes of Society." And although I found many of the opinions posited by the author to be very biased, the report is very research detailed and I learned a lot about Mexican culture and how death is viewed. I find it incredibly interesting that for those, as the author puts it, "whose lives are of crime or directly touched by crime" are so influenced by the notion of sacred death. Perhaps this notion of Sacred Death is hope by another name...

So how am I affected by my artist today? I think that because she was exiled and lived in this space between cultures, she understood and executed that position of "living between." I don't know another way to express it right now...maybe I'll have a more in depth understanding in a few weeks, but this is how my brain is wrapping itself today.

Things that I'm finding encompassed in Ana Mendieta's work:

Ritual -creating liminal spaces in the concrete world
Death as a Part of Life
The Bind of location/dislocation (exile)
The dualism of collective memory/forgetting
History and Nature
Identity and Nothingness
Connection and Void


And where does this leave me? I'll be thinking about this question all day today...and probably for a long time afterwards.