Proceedings of the 7th World Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Reclaiming Endings: Beginnings Through Explosions
Jessica A. Wagner
ABSTRACT:
This paper investigates the impossibility of endings through a conceptual and philosophical analysis of Ana Mendieta’s 1976 film, Anima: Silueta de Cohetes (Soul, Silhouette of Fireworks). The notion of “anima” eliminates endings within the dualistic idea of finality, and continually motivates new beginnings. I examine the Latin word “anima” as reconceptualizing a framework that ignites a revolution of thought opposing vertical and horizontal planes of determination, therefore, creating a “rhizome,” a concept coined by Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987). Within the inspection of space and place, Mendieta’s interdisciplinary atmosphere inspires middle thinking, breaking free from the duality of endings and beginnings that enforce subject objecthood, as described in Franz Fanon’s origins of colonization in Black Skin White Masks (1952). Mendieta’s Anima: Silueta de Cohetes firework explosions create flashes of the anima, a soul that survives, similar to the notion of fireflies in Didi Huberman’s Survival of the Fireflies (2008).
keywords: Anima, Endings, Beginnings, Subject, Object