Maria Evelia Marmolejo
América
According to the Colombian scholar María Iovino, in 1981 María Evelia Marmolejo created the first feminist performance art piece in Colombia, 11 de Marzo (March 11th), an action with menstrual blood. A graduate of visual arts from Instituto Departamental de Bellas Artes in Cali, Marmolejo was influenced by the body art movement of the 1970s. Her ritualistic performances Anónimos 1, 2 y 4 (Anonymous 1, 2 and 4, 1981–82) involve self–mutilation and psychophysical experimentations with organic matters such as blood, human placentas, urine and earth. Her practices often have a healing aspect and involve medical paraphernalia such as gauze, adhesive bandages and menstrual pads. Marmolejo’s production of strong imagery evokes and responds to Colombia’s recent and past history. In America (1985), performed at Plaza Colón, Madrid, Spain, Marmolejo proposed an act of mourning for the 500th anniversary of the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, thus reminding of the death of 64 million Native Americans between ‘the conquest’ and colonial times. EF
At the site Marmolejo distributed a printed sheet with passages from Bartolomé de las Casas' Breve Destrucción de las Indias (1542, published 1552), a sixteenth- century indictment of Spanish brutality against Indigenous peoples. She cut her fingers and wrote the word "América" in blood on the pedestal of the Columbus monument. A mirror the length of her body was then broken, its fragments gathered into a basket and handed to those gathered around her, each shard a reversal of the mirrors carried across the Atlantic during the Conquest, now returned to the place from which that traffic had set out. The police detained her for several hours.
courtesy Maria Evelia Marmolejo