Mythologies of Return – Aurora De Armendi

Mythologies of Return:

Revisiting Ana Mendieta’s Rupestrian Sculptures

Mythologies of Return: Revisiting Ana Mendieta’s Rupestrian Sculptures is a limited edition artist’s book honoring Ana Mendieta’s Rupestrian Sculptures and her original proposal of making an artist’s book of this series. With the project concept, copperplate photogravure images, printing and binding by Aurora De Armendi and an interdisciplinary scholarly essay entitled Mythologies of Return: The Taíno Route in Ana Mendieta’s Rupestrian Sculptures by Adriana Méndez Rodenas, the authors have joined their distinctive areas of expertise in reinterpreting Mendieta’s series as it appears thirty years later.

Book Details:
This hand-sewn, long-stitch, soft-cover artist’s book is bound in St. Armand paper with Cave paper for the spine support. The end sheets are Nara Natural Dyed Green paper. Each image title was handset in Garamond type. The essay was set in Bembo digital type and letterpress printed from polymer plates onto text-weight paper. The copperplate photogravures were printed on Gampi and chine collé onto Somerset paper. The book is housed in a slipcase covered in Iris book cloth.

6.9 x 10.24 x 0.7 inches
Edition of 20, 56 pages
2009 – 1017

Images from top left to bottom right:

1: Installation view at The Center for Book Arts

2: Printing Maroya, Color copperplate photogravure

3: On my first visit to the site, I spent a few hours looking for Mendieta’s sculptures with no luck. Accidentally me and my cousins came across Santiago Fonseca, a school security guard in las Escaleras de Jaruco who made this drawing for us to be able to find the cave. He recalled seeing Mendieta work for most of the day in the early 1980’s.

4-8: On our way to the cave and coming across Ana Mendieta’s work.