This film is a performance that the artist undertook at Old Man’s Creek, Sharon Center, Iowa City, Iowa. The performance was recorded on Super-8 film and 35mm slides. The film shows Mendieta standing naked on the sandy bank on one side of the creek, in front of flowing water and a steep mud bank on the other side. After looking directly at the camera, she raises a flask to shoulder level and begins pouring blood down her chest, legs and stomach. She then reaches over her shoulders to include her back, and covers her arms before casting the empty vessel aside. Dropping to the ground, she plunges face-first into a heap of white feathers where she slowly rolls back and forth, adhering the feathers to the sticky blood on her skin. Finally, she rises slowly to stand with her arms held away from her body but bent at the elbow as though she is imagining being a bird with wings. She holds this position for a few seconds before the film ends.

A single-channel video (transferred from Super-8 film), color, silent, where we watch the artist from behind as she traces a rough outline of her body in blood against a white wall.

Short film by Ana Mendieta.

A dead tree. A body. Ocean waves.

Super-8 film transferred to high-definition digital support, colour, silent. Fundamento Palo Monte belongs to the Siluetas, a series of ephemeral works that the artist made between 1973 and 1981 and then recorded on film or in photographs. Made in Iowa, Fundamento Palo Monte shows a form hollowed from the ground and filled with white gunpowder, with three stones in the position of the heart. The fire consumes the silhouette from the base to the head. At times, the flames and thick white smoke obscure the form in the ground, which then reappears through the thinning wisps of smoke as the powder burns out. What remains is the charred figure, the work of earth, fire and air. The time of combustion and the time of the film are one.

1. Sweating Blood, November 1973 2. Blood Writing, February 1974 3. Body Tracks, March 1974 4. Burial Pyramid, Summer 1974 5. Untitled, Summer 1974 6. Flower Silueta No. 2, June 1975 7. Alma Silueta En Fuego No. 2, November 1975 8. Silueta de Arena, August 1978 9. Isla, 1981 10. Filmworks, August 1980 11. Esculturas Rupestres, June 1981 12. Anima, 1976 13. Fire Silueta 14. Untitled Silueta 15. Esculturas Rupestres, June 1981 (either mislabelled, or split into two parts or outtakes)

Some of the films are presented in tandem in darkened interiors that resemble the caves where Mendieta sculpted some of her final works. One film depicts the artist lying naked in a creek, suggesting cleansing and rebirth. In another film, "Keane College Volcano" at Galerie Lelong, the wind is gently stirring a mound of ash that swirls up from a stone form's breast. The bluish powder twirls up and teasingly dissipates. This breathless little dance,this choreographed chance of the elements is the best. Ana Mendieta may have written her name on the earth in disappearing ink, but she did it so well that we can't erase it.

Ana Mendieta, 1974

In Ana Mendieta’s Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece), the artist’s silhouetted form is replicated as an effigy with blazing fireworks, the flickering embers gradually extinguishing until there is but a single spark left to stave off total darkness.

Ana Mendieta, 1975