Cuba in Tania Bruguera’s work: The body is the social body

Gerardo Mosquera
January 2010

From: Mosquera, Gerardo. “Cuba in Tania Bruguera’s work: The body is the social body,” Tania Bruguera: On the political imaginary, Ed Charta, Milano, Italy, 2009, (cover & illust.) pp. 23 – 35.

ISBN 978-88-8158-764-3

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Cuba in Tania Bruguera’s work: The Body Is The Social Body 

by Gerardo Mosquera

Two of the most impressive and moving experiences I ever had before works of art occurred when aesthetic and social components empowered each other. Both factors were so well integrated that these works could be considered either art or social actions. Thinking about this today makes me even more aware that a key reason for my attraction to art is its manifold potential for dealing with things beyond itself in a unique, profound manner.

Both works were performances. Not that I have any particular inclination towards this form, but only the qualities of performance art could have carried the impact of these specific works: action and experience were the means of shaking things up. These extraordinary performances, which did not occur at main art centers but in crumbling Old Havana, addressed critical cultural, social, and political issues in Cuba. What’s more, they took an active part in them. The actions both happened during the Havana Biennial, one as an alternative, independent event, the other as part of the Biennial’s parallel program. The first one took place in 1997, the second in 2008. Both were by Tania Bruguera. In between them lies a decade of intense artistic actions that has credited Bruguera as a major international figure in performance art.

The 1997 performance was held on a late afternoon in the artist’s home, located at a turbulent spot in Old Havana. Unfortunately, the only available visual documentation of this action are artist Pedro Abascal’s photos. There is also the recording of a reenactment staged by Bruguera. The work is very difficult to describe because a crucial aspect was the setting’s complex environment and the ambiance that the performance created around it. The artist opened a wide entrance, rarely in use, that directly connects her living room with a narrow street and a creepy bar right in front. In this way, her private space became part of the populated, intense street life. All the furniture was removed, and Statistics (1996-1998), an artwork consisting of a twelve foot high Cuban flag made out of human hair-some of it coming from friends of the artist who lived in the country and others who had just gone into exile was hung as the backdrop. The artist stood in front facing the street, dressed in white jumpers with an open lamb carcass hanging from her neck and two ceramic bowls before her. In a state of concentration, Bruguera took soil from the bigger bowl, moistened it in the smaller one containing fresh water with salt, made small balls of the dirt, and ate them.

Titled The Burden of Guilt, the action referred to a legend about native Cubans eating soil to commit suicide as a passive way to resist the Spanish conquistadores. Wearing a lamb carcass as a sort of dress was another reference to protection through submission. The performance also alluded to a Passover ritual, in which water with salt recalls the suffering and tears of the Jewish people enslaved in Egypt. More importantly, “to eat dirt” (comer tierra) is a Cuban expression that means to suffer strong hardship. The performance took place at an extremely critical period in Cuba, after the country’s patron, the Soviet Union, collapsed, and in the midst of the Cuban regime’s unwillingness to reinvent their politics in order to respond to new times. As a result, people in Cuba were “eating dirt.”

And yet, beyond all these references and other more intimate suggestions of guilt, sacrifice, and endurance, the gesture of this young Cuban woman eating Cuban dirt in Old Havana for forty-five minutes, introducing the Cuban soil, the Cuban land, into her organism at a critical time, feeding on it or poisoning herself with it, was so candid, so disarmingly immediate, heartbreaking, and poignantly rich in meanings and feelings that it was impossible to divide it from a living piece of reality. The artist’s body was her own subjective body, but it was simultaneously ritualized into a social body.

A main signifier for this artistic experience was its setting. The space was packed with people from the Cuban art world and international visitors who were in Cuba for the Biennial, and also with neighbors, passers by, children, and people attracted by such an unusual event, while customers in the bar watched from across the street. There was a constant, random flux of people walking around or staring inside for a while and then continuing on their way-even a dog entered the space and stayed close to the artist. The police arrived later. A dynamic, ever-changing mix of very diverse people looked, commented, tried to understand was going on-“She is saying that we all are eating soil!” a man retorted-sweated, agglomerated. The performance space actually became part of the street, in what could be considered a public artwork emanating from a private realm. The situation was vibrant and noisy, with people exclaiming out loud and the street sounds, from traffic to laughs, creating an intense atmosphere in which performance, audience, location, sounds, smells, and context were woven together.

Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version), the 2009 performance, was a participative action at the central courtyard of the Wifredo Lam Center (the institution that organizes the Havana Biennial). A stage with a podium, two microphones, and a huge golden-brown curtain as background were placed at one end. The set was reminiscent of thestaple one used by Fidel Castro for his speeches. The microphones were connected to an amplifier with speakers, one of them at the building’s entrance, pointing to the street. Two actors, a woman and a man dressed in Cuban military uniforms, stood at each side of the podium. The woman had a white dove in her hands. Admission to this event was free, but, in contrast to The Burden of Guilt‘s mixed, spontaneous, more grassroots audience, the space was filled with people from the Cuban art world, mainly young artists, and with students, writers, and Cuban and international visitors to the Biennial. Two hundred disposable cameras were handed out to the public by Bruguera to document the event. Then people were summoned to speak their minds on the podium for one minute. In other art contexts this would not have had any special relevance. In Cuba, it was an historic event: for the first time in half a century a free public tribune was allowed for people to express their ideas. Thus, the artwork managed to use art’s more permissive field to create a space for freedom in a totalitarian context. The performance was art due to its symbolic structure, and because it was labeled as such and was taking place in an art framework. Simultaneously, it was a radical political action in Cuba.

Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version) took Irit Rogoff’s productive notion of “the exhibition as occasion”1to the extreme, while uniting art with the real, as in The Burden of Guilt. In her lecture-performance On Politics, Bruguera has pointed out that “art is a safe platform from which to have a dialogue about political ideas and even try new political structures.”2The first person to take the podium was Guadalupe Álvarez, a Cuban critic and professor who played an instrumental role in the so-called New Cuban Art by supporting and discussing it during the 1990s,while introducing contemporary theory at Havana’s University and Art Institute, for which she was given so much trouble that she was forced to resign. She finally left the country for Ecuador, where she still lives today. The military-looking actress put the white dove on Álvarez’s shoulder, in an obvious allusion to the emblematic image of dove-on-the-shoulder Castro delivering his first speech in 1959 in Havana after the revolutionary victory against dictator Fulgencio Batista. Meanwhile, the actor kept control of time on his watch. To general surprise, all Álvarez did at the podium was cry, a painful, awesome “¨statement given the performance’s references, the context, and her personal story.

Many diverse speakers went to the podium, received the dove on their shoulders, and, if they exceeded the one-minute limit, were violently taken away by the “military” actor. Among the initial speakers was Yoanni Sánchez, a famous young Cuban blogger, officially tagged as an active political dissident, who advocated for free Internet access in the country. The performance snowballed into an unexpected, spontaneous political rally. Statements ranged from calls for free elections to shouts of “Freedom! Freedom!” Participants in the audience became outspoken while, at the same time, concern with repression saturated the environment with a tense, fearful climate. Perhaps the statement that epitomized the whole event was that by a woman who said that she wished that one day freedom of speech in Cuba would not have to be a performance. Indeed, Bruguera’s art work managed to profit from art’s privileges (aura, tolerance, international attention) in order to make the impossible possible in Cuba: a free public tribune. Art created the opportunity for political action, opening a space for freedom.

As one can see, an event like this is a major, striking issue in Cuba. The next day, the 10th Havana Biennial Organization Committee published an official proclamation condemning the performance in the most authoritarian terms and language. This declaration completed the work’s semantic circle, showing its political impact. But, as Bruguera has also stated in On Politics, artists’ privileged position can only exist if people with real access to power allow it.3Why was a project like Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version) allowed? In my opinion, the Biennial organizers, the State Security, and other implicated officials miscalculated the possibility of people reacting so strongly to the occasion facilitated by the performance. 

They probably thought that self-censorship as a result of terror would make people afraid to take the risk of speaking out and, in the case of someone going beyond the limits, his action would take place within a reduced art context. The authorities possibly considered also that the audience would chiefly consist of international visitors and that some light critical expressions would serve to project a good image. The prospect of no one daring to speak out was also considered by the artist, who conceived her piece to work in a different way in case the public remained silent. She thought of the empty podium as a “monument to the void,” a monument to Castro’s absence after fifty years of being a daily, overwhelming presence for Cubans.4Also, an empty podium with two microphones was famously painted in 1968 by Antonia Eiriz, a leading Cuban artist who was censored and who reacted by renouncing art for the rest of her life in a dramatic statement about repression and freedom. The empty podium would clearly refer to that emblematic Cuban painting and the story behind it. 

But that did not happen, and what took the authoritiesby surprise and upset them the most, as can be deduced from the official declaration’s content, was the presence and participation in the performance of persons officially labeled as dissidents. Since the mid-1980s, many of the artists in Cuba have played a critical role by frequently discussing the country’s crisis in a serious and complex mode. Most of these critical artists, including Bruguera herself, can be considered dissidents. However, until Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version), there was a split in Cuba between critical artists and opponents to the regime who by engaging in direct, peaceful political resistance are marked as dissidents and “counterrevolutionaries” and treated harshly. As in Sánchez’s case, their actions usually consist of criticizing and denouncing the situation in Cuba-very similar to what artists do. However, the latter are not classified as dissidents and enjoy tolerance by virtue of being artists-many of them are well known internationally-and thanks to the indirect, metaphoric character of art’s political criticism. Although a few artists like José Angel Vincench and others have included references to Cuban political dissidents in their works, Bruguera mixed both sectors for the first time, bringing them together to perform an artwork that was both artistic construction and real political action, even in the very character of the participants involved.

Now, reading my efforts to describe these two performances and, even more, to convey the experience that many of us in the audience went through, I realize the difficulty of “reading” them because, as Judith Butler would say, these performances “effected realness”: “the impossibility of reading means that the artifice works, the approximation of realness appears to be achieved, the body performing and the ideal performed appear indistinguishable.”5Such fusion, which comes from the Situationist notion of suppression and realization of art as two inseparable conditions for surpassing it,6made these two performances extraordinary occurrences that achieved what Bruguera has stated to be her main goal: to work with reality, not with  representation. “I want people not to look at it [the artwork] but to be in it, sometimes even without knowing it is art.”7Being in the art makes it difficult to read, but not to remember as a memory of something that becomes part of your own life experience. The artist has also said that she wants her art to be “an experienced emotion,” and its documentation not to be photos or videos, but a “lived memory”-an art to be remembered more than to be seen.8

Political content and action have been intrinsic to Bruguera’s art since its inception. She has suffered harsh censorship, as with her untitled performance at the 7th Havana Biennial in 2000, which lasted only one day, or, more dramatically, with Memory of the Postwar I and II, the independent art and culture newspaper that she published in Havana in 1993-1994 with contributions by Cuban and foreign artists and authors.9In a country without free press, to publish an underground newspaper with critical content was and is a radical action to undertake. In a way, it was an endurance performance due to the official hostility, the practical difficulties, and the lack of resources to make a black market publication in Cuba. The publication gave painful troubles to the artist and was banned and confiscated after its second issue, while some Cubans who participated in the project were detained or fired. Memory of the Postwar, which the artist considers part of her Arte de Conducta (behavior art), can also be seen as cultural activism. However, for Bruguera, real activism cannot be separated from her artistic practice. In these performative actions the body that performs “is the social body,” as the artist has stated.10The other way around, in performances like The Burden of Guilt, it is her performing body that impersonates a social body.

Bruguera is part of the critical orientation typical of Cuban arts from the mid-1980s until today. Beyond its broad international diffusion and impact, her work has to be understood from this context. In an unexpected substitution, the lack of civil society, independent media, and spaces for discussion in Cuba have been partially compensated by the arts, which-in a tendency that began in the visualarts-have operated as one of the very few critical arenas tolerated up to certain limits. In Cuba the formula is: total governmental control over the media, restricted freedom for the arts. Of course, this responds to the arts’ minority appeal together with the strong pressure from the intelligentsia, the international solidarity that it enjoys, and the regime’s strategy of allowing some criticism that can function as an escape valve. In any case, Cuba has built a critical culture that has analyzed the country’s predicament in depth, from an internalized position, addressing the collapse of its utopian project, the failure of the social hopes that had been so messianically instilled, and the nation’s critical situation, among other urgent and relevant issues. Bruguera’s cultural and political activism comes from that context; she is part of a general movement in Cuban culture. 

The inclination towards political dissent in Cuban art was introduced by a new generation of artists who, in the 1980s, transformed the official modernist, ideology-centered, nationalistic, conservative status quo of the previous decade, freeing the scene and renewing the country’s culture. The 1980s are increasingly being considered the Golden Age of Cuban art, to the point of becoming a myth. It was a period of very intense, transformative artistic energy, and also of conceptual discussion, social criticism, and openness to international trends. An art of ideas prevailed, with neo-conceptual and postmodern slants. Performance, set off in the late 1970s by Leandro Soto, was significant at the time, to the point that Ángel Delgado spent six months in jail for defecating at an opening, as part of an unannounced performance.11The Havana Biennial was also launched in 1984, establishing Havana as the first space where contemporary art from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East was exhibited and discussed, pioneering the international art circulation that we enjoy today and creating a global space for encounter and exchange. 

Bruguera was part of the continuation of this artistic process-which has been called the New Cuban Art12-in the 1990s, when she came into her own as an artist. She has acknowledged that Cuban artists from the 1980s such as Carlos Cárdenas, Flavio Garciandía, Glexis Novoa, Lázaro Saavedra, JoséÁngel Toirac, and the Arte Calle Group have been “the real and most important influence” in her work.13It is telling that those she mentioned were some of the most confrontational and politically oriented artists in the 1980s, and that she is neither referring to the impact of an individual figure on her nor to a formal or poetical intertextuality, but rather to a general spirit of connecting art with society in a real and critical manner. Another key inspiration was Ana Mendieta, who visited Cuba several times during the 1980s and was very close with and influential to the new Cuban artists. 

Mendieta’s effect on Bruguera was preceded by her training with Juan Francisco Elso at the Elementary School of Art in Havana when she was very young. This remarkable artist, who passed away in 1988 at the age of thirty-two, was paradigmatic of the new Cuban artists’ mystical and “anthropological” inclination14in the first half of the 1980s (José Bedia, Ricardo Brey, Rubén Torres Llorca). They made installations that were often instruments of an existential experience, using methodologies related to Afro-Cuban religions, and stimulated the symbolic dimensions of the materials. These methodologies helped them to codify artistic-philosophical discourses of a transcendental telluric nature, using invented rituals and carefully structured symbolism. The connection with Mendieta’s silhouettes and body-earth works is obvious; there was actually a meaningful intertextuality and exchange between her and these artists. The leading artists who emerged during the second half of the 1980s most of the list that Bruguera has mentioned as her main influence-followed an opposing social and critical approach.  Elso’s teaching was a projection of his art, and he looked to activate a creative personal experience among his disciples, akin to the work just described. Young Bruguera was part of this general feeling, and her admiration for Mendieta prompted her to re-enact the Cuban-American’s performances and earth-body works, to carry out others that Mendieta left sketched, and to invent other ones. These appropriations and re-enactments were an homage, a way to make Mendieta known to younger artists in Cuba who at the time ignored her, but also, and more significantly, they were a vicarious procedure to bring Mendieta back to her homeland, to Cuban culture, and to life.15What RoseLee Goldberg called “Bruguera’s re-performances,” which she considered an “entirely new approach to performance history,”16were artistic transubstantiations born out of the ritualistic, mystical approach to art typical of Elso and other Cuban artists in the early 1980s. Even more, they involved the act of possession, the main liturgical moment of Afro-Cuban religions. Possession, typical of Sub-Saharan traditional religions, consists of a deity or a spirit taking control of the worshipper’s body, usually during a ritual dance, to come to this world and express himself. Bruguera’s re-performances were artistic-religious possessions, or were loaded with their undertones. At the time when she made these appropriations, Bruguera did not know Mendieta’s early performances, which showed a socially critical feminism more related to Bruguera’s later work. When she discovered them in Mendieta’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum, she expressed her preference for these pieces over the ones that she had reenacted.17Bruguera thus evolved from a mystical poetics to social action, the reverse of Mendieta’s path. 

Two crucial events happened in Cuba at the turn of the decade that conditioned the art scene in the 1990s. One was a repressive backlash as a result of political art going beyond the degree of criticism that the government was able to tolerate. The other was the artists of the 1980s’ massive diaspora motivated by this new situation and the legal restrictions that were hampering their international movement. Critical art did not disappear, but the generation of the 1990s, to which Bruguera belongs, was, in general terms, less poignant in this aspect. 

Bruguera was trans-generational: she took the critical political spirit of the previous generation that had left the country and developed it within the new one. Although, I insist, there was plenty of political art in the 1990s in Cuba, Bruguera was the only artist of that generation who systematically followed a social line throughout her entire career. Back in 1995, I wrote: “Bruguera is always striving to unite artistic practice with life. Sometimes the works make social commentaries, but they are always derived from a personal perspective, an intimate feeling . . . The social dimension of her work is not only the subject, it is also concrete action.”18This early commitment has shaped her work’s very nature until today. Therefore, focus on social issues, Arte de Conducta, art that commits real actions, collective participation and creation by the audience, Bruguera’s understanding of authorship, and other crucial elements of her work were widely developed in international terms by the artist, departing from Cuba’s spirit and its seeds during the 1980s. 

Bruguera shares her time among Chicago (where she teaches), Cuba, and the greater world. She has been included in the top biennials and enjoys broad international demand. Hence, the great amount of energy and dedication that she devotes to a place like Cuba is admirable-not usually the case with artists from the “peripheries” who reach considerable international stature. The Cátedra Arte de Conducta (Center for Behavior Art Studies), an ambitious independent workshop program on “studies in political art”19for young artists in Havana that was held for seven years with the contribution of leading Cuban and international artists, curators, and scholars, has been Bruguera’s main project since it opened in January 2003. Its purpose was to create “an alternative training space focused in the discussion and analysis of social conduct and the understanding of art as a way of establishing a dialogue with reality and the civic current situation.”20The Cátedra was the only training program on performance art in Latin America ever. It played a major artistic and educational role in Cuba by giving young artists the opportunity to work and study for free with figures ranging from Anri Sala to Nicolas Bourriaud, Boris Groys to Thomas Hirschhorn, Dora Garcia to Patty Chang, and dozens more. Conceived by Bruguera as a response to the Instituto Superior de Arte’s decadence and some artists’ use of class advantage, she managed to establish and run an alternative, well-focused, top quality space. Was the Cátedra art or a very effective, much needed, and well-targeted social, educational, and pedagogical action? For Bruguera it was Arte de Conducta, and as such it was shown at the last Kwangju Biennial. 

Actually, the question is irrelevant since, apart from blurring its frontiers and breaking away from given morphologies and classifications, a considerable part of contemporary art is tied to other activities, which sometimes involve social action and personal relations, or it constitutes a diversified process that enters and exits the artistic sphere in certain moments and spaces in order to enter and exit others. Certainly there have been many efforts to avoid the self-restriction of art and to grant it more cultural and political significance without diminishing the complexity of its discourse. All of these strategies of connecting art with political action and social activism, education, sociology, psychology, technology, research, personal interrelations, or shamanism are plausible, although they often have not been able to go beyond representation. In many cases the works suffer the fatalism of art’s fetishization: they tend to be legitimized in restricted, traditional auratic spaces. Worse, sometimes when artists go out to the social environment it is just to try a particular way of making the work, whose predetermined final destination is the showroom, the publication, or the web, after having been documented for this purpose. Documentation is frequently the super-objective that operates from the project’s very moment of conception, and the work is only the process that leads up to it. Too many times, actual social implications and effectiveness fall to the background, so the works are generally judged by their artistic-conceptual excellence rather than their real impact on the social context where they unravel, an impact that is not measured beyond the anecdote. The structure of the artistic field-highly specialized and intellectualized-based on exhibitions, publications, in-the-know elites, collectionism, and the luxury market, has not been so radically defied as it seems.21  

By intending art to achieve real and necessary social and political actions, Bruguera tries to go beyond these mannerisms. She has also been reluctant to exhibit and sell documentation about her performances and prefers to sell the right to re-enact them, an action that might introduce changes to the original work according to the new situation in which it will happen. “What needs to be reproduced,” she has stated, “is not the gesture, not the image that is the result of the gesture, but the implication of the gesture.”22This idea corresponds with her notion of documentation as a living memory, an impression, a feeling that remains with you after participating in the performative experience. She has even executed this notion in her piece 46 Days, 46 Performances (2002)

Interestingly, Bruguera is very far from being any sort of street artist or a social or political militant. She is as concerned with the social aspect of her work as she is with the legitimization of her career by the mainstream art world. She is as eager to participate in biennials or to have museum exhibitions as she is to devote herself to the Cátedra Arte de Conducta. In a way, she bridges both sides and makes them empower each other. This is true yet in practical terms: the Cátedra was possible because of her international connections, and at the same time, it gave Bruguera credentials before the art world. However, her Arte de Conducta is not usually artsy, while her more traditional performances and performance-installations always have a social content and frequently look for a social aim. 

It might sound exaggerated to say that all of Bruguera’s oeuvre is about Cuba. Naturally, the place where artists grow up, receive their education, and initiate their careers will remain a basic foundation from which their art will stem. But in Bruguera’s case, on the one hand, a great deal of her work is about Cuba thematically, borrows from the island’s culture and history, and has Cuba’s problems as a target. On the other, when addressing non-Cuban subjects, it seems as if her works were conceived and shaped from feelings, positions, and poetics whose active base is the very complex and traumatic experience of the artist living the failure of utopia in Cuba and its predicaments. We recognize this even in works that can be seen as an indirect reaction to German history, like her untitled video-performance-installation for Documenta 11, or even in Responsible for the Fate (2004), in which such a reaction is very concrete and apparent. 

Although Bruguera’s work is performative rather than “participative,” a basic component of it is to establish grounds for people to take part, interact, and yet more: to express themselves, to create and to undertake action. In the best cases, this generosity is more than an artistic gesture: it satisfies, even if partially and temporally, actual needs, like freedom of speech or art education in Cuba. But Bruguera always does this in a confrontational way, to defy and provoke. There are even cases in which the audience to which she gives voice is also deceived, as in Responsible for the Fate, in order for the work to transmit a critical message about history and guilt.  In Tatlin’s Whisper #5 (2008), the British mounted police harassed the audience using mass control techniques. Bruguera’s work is both belligerent and generous. It stands in opposition to the harmonistic conception of the social that Claire Bishop has criticized in Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, pointing to a more confrontational understanding of human relations.23

1Irit Rogoff, “The Implicated – A Model for the Curatorial?,” opening lecture at the Rotterdam Dialogues. The Curators, Witte de With, Rotterdam, March 5, 2009. 

2Tania Bruguera. Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 2005, p. 155. 

3Ibid

4 Tania Bruguera in conversation with the author in Havana and later through email exchange. 

5Judith Butler, “Gender is Burning. Questions of Appropriation and Subversion,” in Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (eds.), Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, p. 172. 

6Guy Debord, La Sociedad del Espectáculo. Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2000, p. 158. 

7RoseLee Goldberg and Tania Bruguera, “Interview II,” in Tania Bruguera, Op. cit., p. 29. 

8Ibid., p. 27. 

9Memory of the Postwar (Memoria de la Postguerra) was reproduced in Ibid., pp. 62-104. 

10Ibid., p. 31. 

11Glexis Novoa has thoroughly collected information about performance in Cuba during the 1980s. 

12About this art see Luis Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994, and Gerardo Mosquera, “The New Cuban Art,” in Ales Erjavec (ed.), Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition. Politicized Art under Late Socialism. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 208-246. 

13RoseLee Goldberg and Tania Bruguera, “Interview II,” in Tania Bruguera, Op. cit., pp. 29-31. 

14See Rachel Weiss (ed.), Por América. La obra de Juan Francisco Elso. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Dirección General de Artes Plásticas, 2000. 

15RoseLee Goldberg and Tania Bruguera, “Interview I,” in Tania Bruguera, Op. cit., pp. 15-17; Gerardo Mosquera, “Reanimating Ana Mendieta,” Poliéster, 4. 11, Winter 1995, pp. 54-55. 

16RoseLee Goldberg, “Regarding Ana,” in Tania Bruguera, Op. cit., p. 8. 

17RoseLee Goldberg and Tania Bruguera: “Interview I,” Ibid., pp. 11-13. 

18Gerardo Mosquera, “Reanimating Ana Mendieta,” Op. cit., pp. 53-54. 

19Estado de Excepción“. Arte de Conducta. Havana: Galería Habana, 2009. 

20Ibid

21 Gerardo Mosquera, “Art and Politics: Contradictions, Disjunctives, Possibilities,” Brumaria 8, Spring 2007, pp. 215-219. 

22 RoseLee Goldberg and Tania Bruguera, “Interview II,” in Tania Bruguera, Op. cit., p. 19. 

23 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110, Fall 2004, pp. 51-79.