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The mother of ecofeminist Performance Art as we know it today, Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta recognised the birth of art as coinciding with nature itself. She perceived the environment, as Stacy Alaimo frames it, not as ‘somewhere out there’, but forming the ‘very substance of ourselves’ (Alaimo, 4). Writer and artist Bhanu Kapil seems equally fascinated by this connection between the ground and the human, expressing in her ‘End Notes’ for Ban en Banlieue (2015) admiration for Mendieta’s Silueta series (99). Most importantly, she thanks another performance artist, Sharon Carlisle, for her contribution in an act which is inspirational to this entire paper. She writes:
Sharon Carlisle: who dug a rectangle of earth in my back garden and let me lie in it […] I wanted to
study what happens to bodies at the limit of their particular life. There was never a way to do this in
writing. All summer, we analysed the erosion […], shed leaves and patterned/humanized outline on
the ground. (emphasis added) (87)
For Kapil, the exploration of life that allows her to create a ‘humanized outline on the ground’ is something that can never be done in writing. Yet her performances and the written record of them walk together side by side in her book Ban en Banlieue, with recurring acts of her lying down on the ground becoming the perfect point of exploration of her performative works. This essay will explore the meaningful connection between the ground and the human presence in contemporary performances from Kapil, detailed in the ‘Installations and Performances’ section of Ban en Banlieue and recurring throughout the text, and from artist Florence Peake’s CRUDE CARE (2021), performed and exhibited in Aberdeen Art Gallery as part of British Art Show 9. Performance Art puts in conversation these two works, both rooted in how they unravel and problematise a relation with the ground. Is Kapil’s contact with the ground an act of passivity? Or is it an act of resistance? Of her body protesting with and about the ground it is touching? What point can a performance make about physical, visceral connection with the ground? And how does this connection draw us to think about social and exploitative relations with the territory? For the sake of this essay, the term ‘ground’ will be interpreted as the place where nature appears in its horizontal plane, touching with the body once the latter’s verticality is subverted (Best, 75). In relation to the acts detailed, the term ‘ground’ will adopt the meaning of natural ground (e.g. grass, earth), resources within the soil (e.g. clay, extractable materials), and man-made, urban solutions of tamed ground (e.g. pavement, sidewalks). Concepts of ground as motherland and of territory affected by diasporic and colonial significance will be excluded from the focus of this essay, for the sake of brevity and relevance to the performances chosen.
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