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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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
After Nature: The Expanded Landscapes of Ana Mendieta and Ana Vaz
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2021-09-01
2020-03-11
2024-03-11
Cinéma & Cie
Oksana  Chefranova
2020/03/01
Yale University
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After Nature: The Expanded Landscapes of Ana Mendieta and Ana Vaz
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After Nature: The Expanded Landscapes
of Ana Mendieta and Ana Vaz
Oksana Chefranova, Yale University




Abstract

       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.


Landscape Transformations: From Frame to Geology

  ‘Landscape as a way of seeing from a distance is incompatible with the
heightened sense of our relationship to Nature as living (or dying) environment.
As a phase in the cultural life of the West, landscape may already be over’.
(Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art)1

   In his seminal article on landscape in cinema and experimental film, P. Adams
Sitney refers to only one female director, Marie Menken, when mentioning the
artists from whom Stan Brakhage learnt the elements of cinematic landscape.2


1
    Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 22.
2
    P. Adams Sitney, ‘Landscape in the Cinema: The Rhythms of the World and the Camera’, in

                                                     Cinéma & Cie, vol. XX, no. 34, Spring 2020
                                     Oksana Chefranova
                                             ﻿


Nonetheless, women artists’ responses to landscape in different media have a long
history, especially in experimental filmmaking, which as long served as an arena
for women’s artistic preeminence.3 From Margaret Tait to Babette Mangolte to
Ute Aurand, landscape fascinates, remaining one of the privileged, as well as one
of the most challenging, subjects for the camera.4 Women artists’ interventions
into landscape have recently intensify at a time when landscape — in light of our
shifting relationship to the natural environment and expansion of geographical
and cultural borders — resurfaces, as Erika Balsom suggests, as a ‘distinctly
contemporary concern’.5 This article focuses on Cuban American multimedia
artist Ana Mendieta’s experimentations with Super 8mm film during the 1970s
and contemporary Brazilian visual artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz’s assemblages of
16mm filmed materials, found footage, and digital moving images. Their natural,
social, and personal histories all intertwine in Mendieta’s and Vaz’s very different
practices to blur a system of boundaries through which the genre operates in its
experiences of place or land. These two artists represent a break in the monopoly
of traditional European landscape, turning their cameras to Cuban, Mexican, and
Brazilian locations. But they also break the monopoly in a greater sense — bringing
forward the ambiguity and elusiveness of landscape as an idea and experience, the
artists contribute to the transformation of our ways of thinking critically about the
very notion of landscape and its aesthetic paradigms, especially at the intersection
of landscape with the issues of time, depth, and memory.
   Sanctified by the authority of art history, landscape has long been understood
in terms of the visible, as a view inside the frame — the imposition of the frame
mediates land as landscape. The concurrent emergence in the seventeenth
century of Cartesian philosophy and of landscape paintings supports landscape
as an issue of frames and grids, detached representation, and observation of
nature from a position of culture. A hierarchical arrangement of components
within a view, landscape became a complex assemblage of visual and imaginative
constituents subordinated to a thematic motif that unifies a setting into totality.
Field Beach, painted in 1850 by Mary Blood Mellen, one of a number of
women painters associated with the Hudson River School, exposes landscape
as a set of relations — not merely among water, land, and sky, all embraced
by a curve of a picturesque New England gulf — but those that are essentially
anthropocentric (fig. 1). A group of people in the middle ground is pictorially


Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, ed. by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge (UK)
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 103–26.
3
  See recent anthologies: Women and Experimental Filmmaking, ed. by Jean Petrolle and Virginia
Wright Wexman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005) and Women’s Experimental Cinema:
Critical Frameworks, ed. by Robin Blaetz (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007).
4
  Landscape and Film, ed. by Martin Lefebvre (New York: Routledge, 2007); Film Landscapes:
Cinema, Environment and Visual Culture, ed. by Jonathan Rayner and Graham Harper (Newcastle
upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).
5
  Erika Balsom, ‘Why are artist filmmakers turning to landscape?’, Freeze Magazine, <https://
frieze.com/article/why-are-artist-filmmakers-turning-landscape> [accessed 6 November 2019].

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




Fig.1: Mary Blood Mellen. Field Beach. Circa 1850. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Cape Ann Museum.


included, enveloped by the seashore line and the coulisse of trees while the entire
composition points to the landscape’s implications of a human perception, thus a
viewer and a viewpoint, that is often external to the landscape. Landscape always
dramatizes the human presence — even without figures inhabiting the field of
vision, the viewing position points to the human control over representation.
Landscape, as Malcolm Andrews notes, is always figured: formed, inhabited,
and interpreted.6 The soft yellow tone in capturing the sunset lights in Mellen’s
tableau saturates the entire image, and emanating the sense of the pastoral
calm and harmony with nature, it expresses another constituent of landscape
that Georg Simmel pointed to in his 1913 essay ‘The Philosophy of Landscape’
— atmosphere or mood as a primary carrier of a landscape, a universal unifier
that permeates all of its different material elements together.7 Recent critical
insights on landscape see it more as culturescape, a cultural instrument, and a
medium of exchange between the human and the natural, the self and the other.


6
  Malcolm Andrews, ‘Impressing the Landscape: Place and Human Presence in the Recent Work
of British Moving Image Artists’, in Figuring Landscapes, ed. by Catherine Elwes, Eu Jin Chua and
Steven Ball (London: International Centre for Fine Arts Research and Camberwell College of Arts,
2008, pp. 12–48).
7
  George Simmel, ‘The Philosophy of Landscape’, Theory, Culture & Society, 24.7-8 (2007), 20–29.

                                                                                              47
                                     Oksana Chefranova
                                             ﻿


Excavating the German term Landschaft, historian Simon Schama describes it
as having a strong connection with aspects of ‘jurisdiction’, suggesting that the
very term ‘landscape’ came to be associated with loyalty not only to a particular
geography but to a particular set of ideals.8 For Schama, landscape is based on
the principles of belonging, of connection between people and place, rather than
being exclusively evocative of the pleasure of pure aesthetic contemplation.
   The intervention of the moving image into landscape shatters its normative
conventions and surpasses all previous restrictions, especially the enforcement
of immobile enframing as the unifying principle. As Eu Jin Chua notes, the
moving image

     is probably the medium or aesthetic site in which we see, most powerfully, the
     wresting away and reclaiming of the landscape tradition from its bourgeois-Romantic
     roots. Film and video art is very good at activating the dialectics — or rather, the
     multifariousness — of landscape, because, in the moving image, everything that was
     excised and excluded from traditional landscape rushes back into the picture with a
     vengeance, not least, movement and sound [...].9

   This inclusion of the excluded informs my exploration of the juncture between
the women artists’ experimental film practice and landscape, particularly the
inclusion of time ‘in’ and ‘of’ landscape that forces the artists to point their
cameras to land and to the relations between surface and depth. Mapping the
landscape’s range of meanings, I am interested in the material and metaphorical
intersections of film, landscape, and geology — changing over time as well as
fossilizing in time, landscape emerges as a medium of time, mirroring cinema as
another time machine. This calls for reconsideration of landscape in the context
of the recent ‘geologic turn’ in the humanities and film and media studies and
to rely, for example, on the concept of deep time, Tiefenzeit, by which a media
theorist Siegfried Zielinski connects time with earth and with its depth.10
   I focus on the geological imagination of landscape in Mendieta’s and Vaz’s
art while investigating the aesthetic regimes and formal strategies they choose to
express it. The attention to earth as a raw material for landscape is foregrounded
in Mendieta’s experimental films, for whom the geographical and material
conditions of landscape and the elements of land, fire, and water are always
imbued with a sense of embodiment. 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

8
  Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 10.
9
  Eu Jin Chua, ‘Untethering Landscape’, in Figuring Landscapes, pp. 99–102.
10
   Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by
Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). On geological turn, see Jussi Parikka, A
Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

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


approach and the work of excavation while transforming deep time into what
Vaz calls ‘cinematographic multiperspectivism’.11 I argue that it is the attention
to the geological that unites these two artists in their exceeding of landscape as
an object of contemplation with a critique of the position of exteriority and a
departure from traditional aesthetics of landscape as a view toward landscape
as a network of relations among humans, memories, and times. The geological
perspective allows us to recognise landscape as the site at which the human
subject is present albeit no longer central.


     Tracing landscape: The Prehistory and Deep Time of Ana Mendieta

                          ‘I have thrown myself into the very elements that produced me, using
                          the earth as my canvas and my soul as my tools’. (Ana Mendieta)12

                          ‘I really feel that it’s important in my work that I use dirt and sand
                          because these [...] speak about the history of the world or of the
                          earth, of nature, too’. (Ana Mendieta)13

   If landscape has been understood as an intrinsically detached view, Land Art
— which Ana Mendieta practiced with her post-Minimalist works on locations
in Iowa, Mexico, and Cuba — dissolves the distance between the subject and the
object. As an artist experimenting during the 1960s and 1970s with the emerging
genres of conceptual, body, performance, and Land art, she contributed to these
varied dialogues, while the heterogeneity of her art does not allow to confine
the artist within any of the definition used to describe her praxis. Embracing
feminism, Mendieta subverted the monumental gestures of male Land artists
such as Robert Smithson by imposing the human scale onto the landscape. And
while accentuating embodiment of landscape, she was particularly attentive to the
meeting of her land-body art with the act of filming that grew into an inextricable
constituent of the hybrid form she created with sculptural interventions in the
landscape in the Silueta Series.
   Following the mid-twentieth century turn to making art in and of the landscape,
Mendieta’s work expresses an attitude toward the natural environment as a
pliable medium, a tool for art, or a studio, while her ‘earth-body sculptures’,
made during the 1970s, offer vital convergences between Land Art and film.
When working directly on the landscape and with the earth as a raw material,
Mendieta became intimately familiar with and liked Iowa’s soil containing

11
   Stefan Salomon, ‘A Cinema That Could Explode or Implode: Ana Vaz Discusses Occidente’,
Mubi Notebook, 1 June 2016, <https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/a-cinema-that-could-explode-
or-implode-ana-vaz-discusses-occidente> [accessed 6 November 2019].
12
   Ana Mendieta, proposal for the New York State Council on the Arts, 17 March 1982, reproduced
in Ana Mendieta: Traces, ed. by Stephanie Rosenthal (London: Hayward Publishing, 2013), p. 216.
13
   Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta, ed. by Howard Oransky and Laura
Wertheim Joseph (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), p. 128.

                                                                                             49
                                       Oksana Chefranova
                                               ﻿


clay, which made it easier to mould. The artist described her Silueta Series —
for which she cast numerous anthropomorphic shapes and silhouettes onto
the earth by carving them into rocks, sculpting bodily forms out of sand and
gunpowder, submerging them into water, or lighting fire to create outlines — as
an ongoing dialogue between the landscape and her body. When either placing
her body directly on land or constructing an avatar form of herself impressed
and integrated into various natural environments, she thematized a contact with
the earth that rendered the earth as a living thing. Testing the body’s capacity for
identification with earth, Genesis (Buried in Mud, 1975) slowly reveals Mendieta,
appearing with arms outstretched, breathing below a layer of mud — thus, the
soil, breathing in resonance with her, emerges as animated living matter.
   The images, documented via Super 8 film, slides, and photographs, registered
Mendieta’s experimentation with the material substructure of art objects and
communication with landscape in relentless attempts to leave an imprint on
its surface. Articulated through an ontology of loss and disappearance, such
photographs or video moving images that documented Land Art have often
been interpreted as secondary to the original work and experience.14 I argue
that Mendieta’s silent shorts, filmed in black and white or colour, constitute a
kind of single film, or as John Perreault suggests, a cinematic mural.15 They point
to a consistent filmic practice of landscape united by a specific set of themes
— geological elements of landscape, the earth as canvas, time inscribed on the
surface — in reciprocity with the time-base medium of film. Mendieta’s interest
in time, history, and memory imprinted into surfaces of landscape is inseparable
from the gesture of filmic recording. If a phenomenological framing of Land
Art places accents the embodied experience of landscape in resonance with
the corporeal experience of art work,16 Mendieta’s art equally foregrounds the
meeting of earth with technology through the relations between a temporary and
ephemeral earthwork and its filmic documents and records.
   As an art student at the University of Iowa, Mendieta studied Pre-Columbian
culture, primitive art, and archaeology. In 1971, she accompanied the
anthropologist Thomas Charlton on archaeologic digs in Mexico. Prehistoric
cave art permeates the filmic representations of Mendieta. The caves she entered
with her tools and the camera are one of the intermediates of the earth depth
in Mendieta’s landscape — a womb of nature, a prehistorical site of ritual,
and a place that accepts images. The cave determines one of her art’s essential
preoccupations — inaugurating the process that separated humans from the
surrounding world, the cave frames art as both a symbolic action and a tactile

14
   Kathy O’Dell, ‘Displacing the Haptic: Performance Art, the Photographic Document, and the
1970s’, Performance Research, 2.1 (1997), pp. 73–81.
15
   John Perreault, ‘Ana Mendieta: The Politics of Spirituality’, in Covered in Time and History, pp.
24–51 (p. 25).
16
    Guy Brett, ‘One Energy’, in Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performances 1972-
1985, ed. by Olga M. Viso (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1972), pp. 181–202; Suzaan Boettger,
Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley: University. of California Press, 2002).

50
          After Nature: The Expanded Landscapes of Ana Mendieta and Ana Vaz


intervention with representations such as handprints on stone surfaces, implying
the need of the prehistoric artist to project her mark outside of herself through
immediate contact with the material. Mendieta’s art works linger on the memory
of these earliest handprints as a media of fixation of sensory phenomena. In
the cave, prehistory and deep time merge in the idea of imprint that inspired
Mendieta’s Siluetas. Returning to Cuba in 1981, Mendieta made a series of
‘Rupestrian sculptures’: small, shallow-relief carvings modeled on Neolithic
representations of female bodies. Shot in the historic caves in Jaruco State Park
near Havana, the multi-shot and more cinematically complex film, Rupestrian
Sculptures (no. 98, 1981), reveals these sculptures installed in a semi-subterranean
grotto or carved by Mendieta, following the structure of geological formations
into the location. Mendieta’s camera persistently gestures toward landscape by
panning, tilting, and zooming, and these camera’s movements surface as the
filmic equivalents of her hand movements — drawing or gouging, digging with
small implements, or carving into cave walls or land. Like the outline she draws
in the earth that is a production of her hand, resulting from the direct contact
of her body with the material surface, the film insists on being made by hands in
unmediated contact with material. With the camera ‘gesturing’ and ‘touching’
landscape, acting as an extension of the artist’s arm and an intermediary between
the body and environment, the film manifests itself as a tactile intervention into
landscape.
    The geological imaginary of Mendieta’s landscape poetics determines a set of
cinematic strategies — a camera’s gaze that partakes in earth as matter without
shape or form, beginning or end. Her work with Super 8mm — a medium suitable
for recording a performance while also infested with nostalgia, fading colours,
and scratches that inscribe time on the film’s surface, evocative of other artists
such as Peggy Ahwesh and Nina Fonoroff — gestures toward a prehistory of film
medium. The short single-take film made with the static, slightly panning and
tilting camera is reminiscent of early films. Using a Super 8mm camera, the frame
of which approximates a rectangle rather than a square and is just enough to
contain the Silueta, Mendieta refrains from long shots in favour of closer framing
that secures the disappearance of the horizon, turning land into a flat canvas and
landscape into a neutral territory with little alliance to a particular place or time.
By decontextualizing the earth’s surface from other common landscape concerns
with the sky, horizon, and expanses of land, Mendieta refocuses the vision to the
earth as deep matter and as surface. From a single fixed position, the camera
gazes obliquely, usually from above — this verticality of the camera direction
fosters the gaze as ready to plunge into the depth of the landscape. In Volcan (no.
71, 1979), such a gaze is directed toward a miniature artificial mountain with
a Silueta at the centre that is filled with white gunpowder. The staged volcanic
activity releases flowing white smoke, the movement of which animates the
inanimate matter of earth itself — another theme that unifies Mendieta’s films is
the relation between the inanimate matter of earth and its animations. The earth,
burning and erupting, reveals what seems to be a dark hole into the limitless

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                                      Oksana Chefranova
                                              ﻿


depth of geological infinity. Here, Mendieta’s films try to reach the geological
substructure that seethes under the ground — the term ‘deep time’ suddenly
evokes the darker realm looming beneath the earth’s surface. Mendieta’s
earth simultaneously appears as an agreeable material and a disturbing depth
resonating with Gaston Bachelard’s works on poetics of the elements — earth,
for Bachelard, has hidden depth that is not accessible to the eye but only to the
imagination: ‘the depth of that imaginary mine where so many suffer [...] infernal
nightmares’.17 The void of the earth is an example of the prehistoric that also
partakes in the aesthetic paradigm of the sublime, for which the void functions
as a model of the unrepresentable. Mendieta engages in this with scale — the
volcano, a topos of the sublime, is miniaturized to the human scale, rendering
the intimate geological sublime.
   For Mendieta, earth’s depth is temporal, and a temporal inflection that the
artist capitalizes on is the time of the trace, often recorded in the process of its
making or disappearance. Untitled: Silueta Series (no. 66, 1978), shows an earth-
body sculpture — a figure with truncated arms modelled on a Neolithic statuette
or akin to a mummy-like effigy enveloped in a shroud drawn in a thick white
outline of gunpowder (fig. 2). Gunpowder burns leaving a black Silueta, forcibly
imprinting onto earth a memory of the body in a negative counter-relief. Five
handprints visible on the earth near the Silueta confirm the gesture of imprinting.
A cloud of white smoke from burning, blown by the wind to the right edge of
the image, casts a brief shadow on the earth. This layering of simulacra within
the frame — for Oransky, ‘the shadow represents the smoke, which represents
the Silueta, which represents Mendieta’18 — merges with landscape’s geological
layers, which for the artist also include what lies on top: mud, grass, water. Each
layer possesses its own temporality: the time of earth, time of gunpowder burning,
time of smoke dissipating, time of the film itself. As Rachel Weiss notes, time in
Mendieta’s films ‘is not sequential; things don’t occur consecutively’.19 Rather,
the time is layered within the singular frame. With the removal of directorial
intentions, the camera finds its own dialogue with the geology of the earth,
while the single-shot-film format appears the most consistent with showing the
palimpsest of temporalities and the geological structure of stratified time by
eschewing the sequential logic of film editing.
   To speak about the history of the earth and different temporalities of
landscape, Mendieta chooses materials and elements — sand, pigment, waves,
mud, flowers, gunpowder — that are ephemeral and temporary. In Silueta de
Arena (no. 65, 1978), the Silueta from sand and on sand is emplaced in banks of

17
   Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams (Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications, 2011), p. 15. See also
Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground. An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
18
   Howard Oransky, ‘Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta’, in Covered in
Time and History, pp. 80–167 (p. 130).
19
   Rachel Weiss, ‘Difficult Times: Watching Mendieta’s Films’, in Covered in Time and History, pp.
52–63 (p.53).

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


a sandy creek — thus, the slowly running water, rendering the flow of time,
covers the Silueta with a glimmering veil. Mendieta locates the Silueta in the
liminal area between the layers of earth and of water, between their different
temporalities. Left to dissolve, subjected to the smoothing and erosive movement
of water, the longevity of the sand Silueta is a function of natural processes and
the material from which it is made. The self-transforming, metamorphosing
earth is ever changing, transgressing all fixed forms, subjecting them to the
gradual decomposition of geological temporalities that preceded and exceed
human time. For Scottish geologist and naturalist James Hutton, whose Theory
of the Earth (1778) informed the contemporary theories of deep time, the earth
is a machine that, while recording time in fossils, is continuously going through
the processes of erosion and reconstruction.20 Reconceived as a dynamic and
living entity, earth constantly restores itself, often by erasing traces of humans,
and then it itself is outside historical change. As soon as Mendieta situated her
sculpture in landscape, a circle of erosion and earth restoration was initiated. On
a micro and human scale, Mendieta films Hutton’s earth-machine at work. Even
encountering resistance from the landscape, the ephemeral fossilizations of her
artworks also encounter the film apparatus — long disappearing from landscape,
the trace continues to exist on film, fossilized by light on the film emulsion.
   Either a voluminous human-like shape or an empty outline filled with soil
and grass, the silhouette, as a technique of visualizing the body, is based on an
ultimate reduction. The Silueta Series renders the decorporealization of the
artist’s body in the process of its absorption by the landscape — some films
record Mendieta’s body immersed into lands, while in others, the Siluetas
become more and more abstracted, transmuting into a trace of the contour. In
Mendieta’s practice, the body progressively undergoes transformation, reduction,
and ruination in its merging with landscape, and the subject gradually vanishes,
becoming part of the geological fabric. This movement toward disappearance
recalls the logic of the film image: in the process of imprinting on the celluloid,
the body decorporealizes. In her interest in inscribing a trace, however mutable
and fleeting, the ontology of Mendieta’s Silueta resonates with the ontology of
film image — earth acts as film emulsion, flexible and absorbent, as a medium of
recording. In the search for deeper layers of landscape, Mendieta exposes a deep
layer of cinema, its ontology as an imprint on the surface, its prehistory as an
authentic and ephemeral trace. As André Bazin claims, cinematic ontology stems
from the impulse of preservation and recording and then is indicative of the
transcendence of death.21 While film has an ability to capture a temporal moment,
it is not able to capture the grand time of earth — the geological perspective
reveals the phenomenological limits of cinematic recording. Mendieta’s indexical



 James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (Reprint) (CreateSpace, 2012).
20

 André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What is Cinema?, ed. and trans. by
21

Hugh Gray, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), i, pp. 9–16.

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                                      Oksana Chefranova
                                              ﻿


and tactile imprints are always a corporeal gesture alluding to a visceral impact of
art that exceeds the function of mere recording and preserving.


     Of mines and clouds: Ana Vaz’s geology of memory

                          A Idad da Pedra stems from the idea that everything that exists
                          thinks, everything has a mode of thinking and seeing. In that sense,
                          it is a film that takes Gilles Deleuze’s idea ‘who does the earth
                          think it is’ from A Thousand Plateaus almost as a cinematographic
                          instruction. The film departs to this landscape that has a particular
                          history while trying to read strata, animals, vegetable, and mineral
                          matter as speaking, seeing, alive things… Cinema is an art, par
                          excellence, of the Anthropocene. (Ana Vaz)22

   Ana Vaz works within the global field of expanded cinema and artists’ moving
image that, among its many preoccupations, explores the meeting points among
the environment, memory, and colonialism, epitomized, for example, by multi-
layered installations of the visual artists John Akomfrah. Perhaps, more than other
artists, Vaz is concerned with the entanglement of the post-colonial discourse
and that of the Anthropocene: with her America: Bay of Arrows (Amérika: Bahía
de las Flechas, 2016) she makes a radical claim by locating the Anthropocene’s
beginning in the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Americas. And more
than other artists, she engages with the question of how the post-Anthropocene
cinema might look like, what kind of a visual regime might partake in this new
imagination.
   From a postcolonial perspective, Ana Vaz traces cultural and ecological
changes in landscape, blending ethnographic study with attentive reading
and hearing a landscape’s mnemonic language. Similar to Mendieta, who
associated the domination of nature with the project of colonization,23
Vaz links an ecological sensibility with an anticolonial stance. Taking the
ontological turn of the Anthropocene as her most profound philosophical
and aesthetic concern, Vaz drives us to reconsider the very existence of the
fundamental divide between the natural and the artificial. In Atomic Garden
(2018), nature, flowers, insects, and the human artifice of fireworks compete
for the screen surface, yet through the shared optical phenomenon of
flickering, thy emerge as non-contradictory forces. Vaz seeks to redefine the
frame that constitutes landscape by establishing its outer boundaries, often
framing something that is uncontainable, for which the frame appears too
small. Intersecting narratives of colonial past and prehistory, mining and land
use, sky and clouds, Vaz employs a cinematographic language of spontaneous


22
   Ana Vaz’s talk ‘I Prefer Not to Be But to Tupi: The Age of the Earth’, 26-28 February 2016, De
Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, Sonic Acts Academy.
23
   Susan Best, ‘The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta’, Art History, 30.1 (2007), 57-82 (p. 67).

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


camera movements, sweeping panning, zooming in and out, and unusual
framings to portray a landscape that loosens the binaries between human and
geological, animals and people, macro and micro, planetary and atomic. The
ideas of landscape memory and historical loss in Vaz’s artworks are intertwined
with the extractive practices of mining. Look Closely at the Mountains (2018),
directly devoted to mining activities, engages in the comparative research of
the effect induced on landscape by over three centuries of mineral extraction
in two regions — the state of Minas Gerais in the Southwest of Brazil and
the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region in France. Vaz’s perspective on mining as the
transformation of the environment by humans, destroying and yet attempting
to alleviate damage already done, intersects with mining as the excavation
of memory, resonating with Walter Benjamin’s idea in ‘Excavation and
Memory’ that memory can be considered to be ‘the medium of that which is
experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried’,
so that ‘he who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself
like a man digging’.24 For Vaz, the earth’s depth is a temporal one, the earth is
a recording medium that inscribes time in geological strata — the mountains
and caves of Minas Gerais become the repositories of memories, prehistoric
images, and inscriptions, whereas landscape appears as a palimpsest of
different archaeological, geological, and mnemonic layers.
   The Age of Stone (A Idade da Pedra, 2013) interferes with the geology
of landscape in the most explicit way, as Vaz’s approaches landscape as a
terrain for excavating and reimagining the past — the geological foundations
of Brasilia, a planned city designed by modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer
in the central, vast and arid plateau of Brazil, the sertão, a simultaneously
physical and mental place. The surrounding territory has been historically
marked by the excessive mining of minerals and precious stones. For Vaz,
the project of Brazil’s modernization is intertwined with the idea of Brasilia
as a ruin of the future. The city ‘denied the prehistory that was consistently
there, and the films tries to find its prehistory in this geological deep time that
confounds past and future’.25 As the film plays, quite deliberately, with the
tradition of ethnographic cinema and its idea of collecting remote landscapes
and histories, the image of Brasilia is rendered indirectly, composed from two
landscapes, filmed on locations distant from each other and remote from the
city itself — Chapada dos Veadeiros, north of the capital, and Perenopolis
to the west. In Chapada dos Veadeiros, the camera explores flora, fauna,
and geological formations of yellow rocks, captivating in their variety of
forms, textures, and colours of stones. These natural formations of rocks are



24
   Walter Benjamin, ‘Ibizan Sequence’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, (1931-1934), ed. by
Marcus Paul Bullock and others, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2005), ii, p. 576.
25
   Ana Vaz, I Prefer Not to Be to Tupi: The Age of the Earth, Sonic Acts Academy, Amsterdam 2016.

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                                        Oksana Chefranova
                                                ﻿


juxtaposed by a montage with an enormous quartzite mine, a landscape made
by years of excavation, human digging, and carving inside the earth.
   While the natural rocky landscape of Chapada dos Veadeiros is filmed
by the peripatetic corporeal camera walking among the rocks and the
body’s corporeal reactions to landscape, its pedestrian rhythm, and even its
breathing, are transcribed into landscape images — the mining canyon in the
vicinity of Perenopolis becomes aligned with another formal technique. After
the camera frames the mountains covered with green vegetation, it follows
a man descending a pass into the mine’s depths. The horizon gradually
rises, moving closer to the top edge of the frame until it disappears from
view. Reaching the bottom, the camera investigates the earth’s interiority,
a monumental human-made landscape of the pit with a panoramic sweep,
slowly revealing the landscape at the depth — hills made of stones alternating
with flatlands, water reservoirs, winding roads, workers miniaturized to
staffage figures in the far background, and the stratified geological structure
of earth walls. Engaging with the depth of the ruins and geological traces,
Vaz’s camera glides circularly, partaking in the aesthetic regime of Panorama
that since the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries existed as an imperial
global medium of landscape in the form of an enormous round painting,
supplemented with faux terrain, and whose 360-degree embrace offered a
seamless horizon and a utopian possibility to see everything from any point
of the viewing platform.26 The privileged position of the central and elevated




      Fig. 2: The caption: Ana Vaz. A Idade da Pedra (The Age of Stone). 2013. 16mm/HD.
                      Courtesy of Ana Vaz and Le Fresnoy Studio National.

26
   On Panorama, see Stephan Oettermann and Deborah Lucas Schneider, The Panorama: History
of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997); Jonathan Crary, ‘Géricault, the panorama, and
sites of reality in the early nineteenth century’, Grey Room, 9 (2002), 5–25; Alison Griffiths, Shivers
Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008); On the Viewing Platform: Perspectives on the Panorama, ed. by Tim Barringer and
Katie Trumpener (Forthcoming, Yale University Press, 2020).

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


platform expressed Panorama’s fantasy of conquering and controlling space.
Panorama traditionally embraced exotic and global, historical and idealized
landscapes — mines and mining constituted a subject of the displays —
saturating them with the all-inclusive, indiscriminating consciousness.
Panorama’s logic of endless horizontality superseded painting, known since
the Renaissance as the image in the frame seen from a single viewpoint, a
‘view through a window’, with the dispersed, seemingly infinite, point of
view — a democratic perspective that abolished hierarchy and guidance.
Experimental cinema has approached panorama in a number of films, with
one of the most compelling examples being a structural film of Michael Snow:
the 190’ La Région Centrale (1971) features a pre-programmed camera set on
a remote northern Quebec mountaintop. Snow’s camera pans and rotates
around itself, exploring the geology of the Canadian wilderness, exceeding
the human scale, while exposing the camera’s anxiety over the film’s largely
invisible centre.27
   A Idade da Pedra culminates in a two-minute-long take with a full-circle
panorama from the centre of the mine, steadily revealing how the white
shiny layers of quartzite are seamlessly continued by pillars of some bizarre
and petrified monumental structure that imposes its presence as if growing
directly out of the geological strata (fig. 3). The structure simultaneously
looks like a construction in the making and a ruin being excavated — one
of the many ambiguities the film plays upon. The derelict architecture that
creates an epistemic uncertainty about the nature of this image itself, its real
or hyperreal status, is in fact CGI developed by French multimedia artist
Anna-Charlotte Yver to supplement the actual landscape, shot on 16mm.
Here, the non-discriminatory vision of the panorama works together with the
CGI to erase the distinction between natural and artificial, contemporary and
prehistory, the opacity of the geological layers and the porosity of the ruin.
The ruin is an object whose presence inevitably suggests absence and whose
melancholy, as suggested by Jean Starobinski, resides in the fact that the ruin
has become a monument of lost significance.28 A fabricated structure and a
copy without the original, the digital ruin, while generating the illusion of a
historical encounter, articulates the absence of an actual historical referent
or past. A constellation of contrasting materials, Vaz’s composite image
partakes in the paradigm of capriccio — an invented landscape composed of
disparate elements, a fantastic collage of actual and fictive elements typically
including stylized ruin fragments blended into the natural landscape, an


27
   Also see Too Early/Too Late by Danièlle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (Trop tôt, trop tard,
France/Egypt, 1981). On Panorama in installation art, see Katie Trumpener’ s essay ‘Moving
pictures: panorama film, photography, photorama, installation’, in On the Viewing Platform (book
forthcoming).
28
   Jean Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty, 1700-1789 (New York: Rizzoli; Genova: Skira, 1987),
p. 180.

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                                      Oksana Chefranova
                                              ﻿


artificial composition with apparent verisimilitude. Since its heyday in
the eighteenth century, the imagination of capriccio has been grounded in
archeology, ruins, and excavation. Figuring spatial compression and iteration,
able to stitch past, present, and future together, capriccio has always been,
according to Lucien Steil, ‘a catalyst of collective memory and imaginary’.29
The ontology of the digital image, its incomplete and composite nature and
constructedness as an object, works here to compress or expand historical
duration, to transcend the teleology of history, removing Brasilia from ‘a pre-
given regime of historicity to truly develop another one’ by rearranging layers
of time.30 While the digital capriccio testifies to a temporal binding, the image
itself emerges not as a Bazinian image that attempts to embalm geological
duration in Mendieta’s works but as a postcinematic layering and simultaneity
as a different articulation of time and space, as a ruinous edifice that visualizes
otherwise incomprehensible deep time of Brasilia.
   Vaz works toward something she calls ‘cinematographic multiperspectivism’,
or ‘a collagist impulse to approximate that which has been disassociated
through power, logic and reason, enlightenment praxis to account for a
history in which things are smoothed out, and linearly organized’.31 She is
more interested in the relations wherein the elements of the work are spliced
together as non-hierarchically ordered parts of a new whole. Vaz’s relation
between the different elements of the landscape in a non-hierarchical,
multiperspectival manner might be closer to what Sergej Ėjzenštejn has, in
a somewhat different context, described through his contradictory notion of
the ‘monistic ensemble’. In film, for Ėjzenštejn, space, motion, and sound ‘do
not accompany (nor even parallel) each other, but function as elements of equal
significance’ in the production of a unified aesthetic totality.32 Vaz employs
the panoramic movement, digitally assembled landscape, and soundscapes to
produce a similarly ‘unified’ visual and aural impression of intense dynamism,
a ‘cinematographic multiperspectivism’, related for her also to different
modes of conversing with the landscape and to the question of how the post-
Anthropocene cinema would look. We might reconsider this early observation
of Ėjzenštejn in an approach to digital film practice and to time-based art
in the gallery. A Idade da Pedra became a part of Vaz’s installation, Depth of
Field, at the Matadero Madrid in 2019, which united four films displayed


29
   Lucien Steil, ‘Preface’, in The Architectural Capriccio: Memory, Fantasy and Invention, ed. by
Lucien Stail (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2014), p. liii.
30
   Guilherme Carréra, ‘Brasília entre ruínas: os documentários de ficção científica de Adirley
Queirós and Ana Vaz’, Aniki: Revista Portuguesa da Imagem em Movimento, 5.2 (2018), 351–377
(p. 358).
31
   Salomon, ‘A Cinema That Could Explode or Implode: Ana Vaz Discusses Occidente’, Mubi
Notebook,        <https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/a-cinema-that-could-explode-or-implode-ana-
vaz-discusses-occidente> [accessed 6 November 2019].
32
   Sergej Ėjzenštejn, Film Form, ed. and trans. by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), p.
20 (Italic is Ėjzenštejn’s).

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


on four large screens inside a dark space.33 The screens render the gallery
as a multiperspectival space, a postdigital picturesque garden that, meant to
be walked through, dares the linearity of conventional audiovisual practices.
Within the assemblage of installation, each screen is discrete and exists
independently but completes each other within a sensible ensemble. In the
gallery, the idea of landscape as a more restrictive concept because of its focus
on the visual, becomes superseded with the idea of environment as a totality of
surrounding forces, implied by its etymology of ‘to encircle’ and ‘to enclose’,
suggestive of the replacement of the single linear vector with a spherical space,
a visual-sonic envelop in which the distance and viewpoint associated with
landscape are no longer valid.
   The concept of deep time appears as a strategy of resistance to teleological
linearity, as Parikka states in relation to Zielinski, for whom earth times
become a theoretical strategy of resistance against the linear progression
of media evolution based on progress of technological devices.34 For Vaz,
such a resistance culminates in the spatialized gallery cinema that renders a
geological concept of stratification while emerging as another form of deep
time. Another consequence of experiencing Mendieta’s and Vaz’s artworks
is for the anthropocentrism of landscape. Landscape filmmaking definitively
places the human subject as the central point of focus, yet contemporary
experimental practices that test the limits of perception and representation
use landscape as an instrument of thinking and making images at scales that
exceed the human. ‘Look closely at the mountains’ from Vaz’s eponymous film
is not merely an eco-protest slogan, but an optics — a mode of vision toward
landscape to look closely at the immense that itself contains a reevaluation of
the landscape through the erasure of a visual hierarchy, such as looking from
a distance and from the outside. Mendieta’s images are gathered around the
body yet figure in a simultaneous encounter and profound distance between
humans and land. While Mendieta transforms the vast scale associated with
geology to intimate connections with earth, indeed looking closely at the
immense, Vaz renders landscape as an immeasurable palimpsest. Yet even if
the human subject becomes less and less the central focus, the artist never
erases the human presence, epitomized in the act of creating an artifice — a
digital insertion of the imaginary ruin into the natural landscape. Even when
considered from a geological perspective, the landscape does not require a
total renunciation of human subject — Vaz’s cinematic geology warrants the
human as a telluric force.




33
   The Age of Stone (2013); Occidente (2014); Há Terra! (There is Land! 2016); Atomic Garden
(2018).
34
   Parikka, p. 37.

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