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Linda Montano: In your work. . .you embody the earth, become it, leave your impression on it. Can you remember an instance from your past that may have encouraged you to leave images of yourself on the earth?
Ana Mendieta: I came from a tropical country (Cuba) and I have pictures of myself, 7 months old, crawling around on the sandy beach. We had a house there and I would be outside from 7:30 a.m. to 2 in the afternoon. . .out in the water and the sand. I learned about my body from doing that. Now I continue to use my body to communicate with the world so that things that I have learned are things which I have experienced and internalized. I'm 5 feet tall so that I even measure tilings with my body. I started doing imprints to place myself and my body in the world. That way I can do something, step away from it and see myself there afterwards.
LM: Why did you begin doing imprints?
AM: I came to this country from Cuba when I was 12. 1 was sent by my parents after the Cuban revolution but they stayed there so that my sister and I were alone, without speaking English, having been placed in a Catholic orphanage run by nuns in Iowa. It was a very devastating experience because I felt alienated and totally misplaced. . .a culture shock. America is a multi-colored society but I came from a place where everyone was alike. So when I got to Iowa and finally learned the language and talked to other people, I found that we would look at the same event, talk about it and would both see it totally differently. It's then that I realized that I lived in a little world inside my head. It wasn't that being different was bad, it's just that I had never realized that people were different. So trying to find a place in the earth and trying to define myself came from that experience of discovering differences.
I had been a painter and worked always with one image but I gave up painting because it wasn't real enough. In 1973 I did my first piece in an Aztec tomb that...