This thesis examines the artistic practice of Ana Mendieta through a close reading of the video work Alma, Silueta en Fuego (1975). The analysis situates the work within the feminist art practices of the 1970s and the period’s critical engagement with questions of the body, identity, and belonging, drawing on theories of performativity and abjection. Particular emphasis is placed on how the work produces meaning through process, absence and materiality rather than through traditional forms of representation.

In Alma, Silueta en Fuego, Mendieta replaces her own body with a silhouette and uses fire as a means of dissolution and transformation. Through this strategy, the work articulates experiences of exile, loss and conditional belonging. The thesis argues that the work functions as a form of artistic resistance to fixed identity categories, in which what disappears continues to operate meaningfully through its remains. In this way, what is lost to fire persists as meaning through the ashes.