INTO WATER, WINDS, AND WOODS
An essay about getting a tattoo in natureA tattoo performance, inspired by the search of home of the artist Ana Mendieta, in collaboration with the artists Khae & Scart.
I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body.”
Ana Mendieta
It's somewhat ironic that I have been tattooing people for the better part of a decade, but I myself am barely tattooed. For the longest time, I have had one single tattoo: a chunky illustration of what should portray a bee. Unfortunately, it turned out to look more like a wasp. It’s a souvenir from my early days as an aspiring tattoo artist, with no skills yet an abundance of willpower, I sat down and decided to place this wobbly image of a bee on my right ankle, by the help of highly unprofessional equipment - a sewing needle and regular writing ink (I did not know about hygiene standards back then). Together, my friend and I sat down to mark the first day of our soon-to-be artist lives - with a guitar and a needle as our mediums. Of course, I placed the ink much too deep into my skin, a classic beginner mistake, so that after only a few weeks the lines started expanding. I later learned this is known as “bleeding“ in tattoo jargon. The low quality didn’t really matter though. The empowering feeling of decorating my skin while my friend was practicing songs was much more important than accurately following the motive. Ideas over aesthetics - in a sense, it was conceptual art.
This was six years ago. Since then, I never felt compelled to add another tattoo to my body. But the experience set me on a journey of learning about the craft of tattooing. I have since learned about (first and foremost) standards of hygiene and layers of the dermis, about styles and motives, and the differences in meaning and significance of tattoos. With all of this newly gained knowledge, it took me six years before I felt ready for a second tattoo. In spring 2024 an idea came to mind, and it stuck with me with the same kind of overwhelming obsession as the first time around.
I was intensely researching the artist Ana Mendieta and her performance art in the 1970s. As a Cuban political refugee, she was sent to the U.S. as a child, leaving her with a sense of loss and homelessness that would last for life. In response to her experience of exile, she created works of art in nature, meditative performances, captured on grainy Super 8 films. Attempting to recreate a home in her artistic practice, her goal was to become one with nature, to immerse her body into the woods and waters around her. I understood immediately. Her body as an extension of nature, fractions of connection marked by contact between her skin and her environment. I wondered if tattooing isn’t a similar expression of a longing to come home. Bringing something to the surface, marking your skin forever, the outermost layer of your body - to me this seems like a quest of finding connection. Because the skin is not only what protects us from the outside, what confines and separates us from our environment - it is simultaneously what connects us to the outside world. Placing a motive on your skin for everyone to see is inevitably a gesture of putting yourself out there in order to be seen. Bridging the inside and the outside, the tattooed skin becomes a surface of connection.
There was something between Mendieta's performances and my practice of tattooing - but what was it? Weeks of research went by, but I just wasn’t able to put my finger on it. I started to wonder whether I would find an answer to the link between Mendieta’s art and the symbolism of tattooed skin in recreating one of these body-nature performances. Maybe, if I was to place myself in a similar environment, becoming an extension of nature myself, I would understand?
And so an idea formed. For my next tattoo, I would go into nature, to recreate one of Mendieta’s performances. Only instead of me being an extension of the natural environment around me, nature would become a part of my body – forever – with the help of needle and ink marking my skin. While Mendieta went into nature to become one with it, I wanted to go into nature to carry a piece of it back home with me. So I went. With the help of two close artist friends, a vision started to form for this search for answers. We packed our things and left for the mountains, we had a few days for the performance (in case the weather was bad.) In Grisons in Switzerland, we found a creek that would serve as the perfect place of inspiration, right at the heart of the Viamala Valley. Only later I would find out that the valley’s name, translating to "the bad way,” would foreshadow the mystical quality of my endeavor.
My tattoo motive would be a plant, an alchemilla, a flower to which I feel deeply connected. We prepared stencil and setup beforehand, knowing that a river was a demanding location for tattooing. When we got there, the sun had not yet reached the deep corners of the valley on this July morning, still filled with a cool breeze of mountain air. Upon making our way across some rocks and through the woods, we started preparing a small station next to the creek. On a flat stone close to the river, I sat down. While the three of us were setting up our equipment, it became clear that the conditions for tattooing here would be more challenging than expected. Turns out that my second tattoo wouldn’t meet studio standards either. I didn’t mind. Ideas over aesthetics.
Feet submerged in the ice-cold water, needle immersed in the pitch black ink. The needle met my skin, following the lines of the alchemilla. After a moment or two, I discovered that what I had expected to be an encounter with pain and patience became a truly meditative sensory experience. Ana, you knew what you were doing… The tattoo machine stopped humming a little more than an hour later, which to me, felt like only a few minutes.
Something was different, obviously, I was now carrying a new tattoo, new ink below my skin, of which I was reminded by the slight burning sensation that announced the beginning of the healing process. But the realization that something had changed was reaching deeper than the layers of my skin. To call the tattoo a performance piece now seemed kind of silly - a performance for whom? All of the experience was now memorized by my body, on a level that the film material could only attempt to portray but never really quite express. Did Ana have the same experiences when she immersed herself in water, mud, and the wind of the forest? Were her works so mesmerizing because they were a glimpse into the intense sensations she experienced when submerging herself in nature?
Now, I am carrying the alchemilla with me on my right shoulder. I carry it, it helps me to carry myself, it carries me. A French expression comes to mind: „Do you have the shoulders for it?“, le poids de la responsabilité. The responsibility of what? …Maybe the responsibility to remember that the body is part of nature and nature is part of me. To trust in its logic and rhythms which are so easily forgotten in the noise of the city. It is now exactly one year after this day in July, and my tattoo is still charged with meaning. I get a warm and gentle feeling every time I look at it. It doesn’t follow any trends, nor has any implicit self-explaining qualities. But yet, it is a surface of connection, between me and this elusive memory, between my body and its encounter with the waters and winds of the Viamala Valley. If Mendieta’s performances helped her to find a home in nature, this tattoo performance has encouraged me to find a home in this body of mine.
Juno Wela, Andeer, Switzerland, 2024.
A tattoo performance, inspired by the search of home of the artist Ana Mendieta, in collaboration with the artists Khae & Scart.