Joana Knezevic : Ideas for the El Acercamiento project
a) APARTMENT34
I started exploring life and death of fabulous Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. She was one of Pedros Pan’s kids. Sometimes she is also considered as an American artist because she studied art in teh USA and not in Cuba. Ana moved to Iowa when she was 13 years old with her sister.
The most interesting thing that I discovered about Ana Mendieta is her philosophy about her work and the idea about female’s bodies. She said, during her exhibition in NY. how we, as women, can turn ourselves from an object into a subject? This question I've found very relevant today and important to communicate through my art. How we can ask the question about women’s rights in Cuba and the USA? Are we on the same page today? What’s the difference? What’s our female identity in the male society? How communism affected my body and my identity from Serbia, how Cuban women and how American's?
The most interesting thing that I discovered about Ana Mendieta is her philosophy about her work and the idea about female’s bodies. She said, during her exhibition in NY. how we, as women, can turn ourselves from an object into a subject? This question I've found very relevant today and important to communicate through my art. How we can ask the question about women’s rights in Cuba and the USA? Are we on the same page today? What’s the difference? What’s our female identity in the male society? How communism affected my body and my identity from Serbia, how Cuban women and how American's?
I was imagining to use Anna Mendieta’s unclear death as a metaphor for American-Cuban relationship towards their art and artists. I would create some images through the city in Cuba and ask the question “What’s happened to Ana Mendieta? Are we all Anna Mendieta? Was she killed by her husband or she committed suicide? Why she was killed and who is responsible for that? Was it the act of killing a woman, an artist or killing women’s art? As all we know, her white husband, also a famous artist (still alive) Carl Andre was that night with her in that apartment. Mendieta fell to her death from Andre's 34th story apartment window in 1985 after an argument with Andre. I’m thinking how is it possible that still today we do not know anything about her death? How we can continue to celebrate female bodies through the mother nature and our female blood on the similar way how it did Ana Mendieta? This work would be Guerilla style. This is mine open dialogue with the identity of Pedros Pan Ana Mendieta, Carl Andre her husband and one window = APARTMENT 34E.
b) UNTITLED PROJECT
An Untitled project that I am brainstorming with Melu Waingarten is a concept about “The Identity” and what the identity means to us as a new (non-official) USA citizens. How our “American” (Argentinian/Serbian) identity can create a dialogue through other Cuban’s artists in order to change the perspective, misconception, and preconception about two different cultures? My personal question is what does that mean being an American?
Creating a “Third Space and Third Language” that serves us in the best way as we believe is possible we want to create the American/Cuban=HUMAN space where every personal and emotional revolution is welcome, possible and celebrated. Being able to see, hear and fell others and to recognize other in yourself is the only possible revolution for us in the 21st century. This is our desire to celebrate our displacement through movement and dance. Our revolutionary space is a place where we can be who we truly are - a responsible human being, man, women, artists, who have a longing to break borders of stereotypical expectation of ‘’otherness” and be unified and pure in our flesh, blood, tears, and sweat.
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