In a piece she titled Anima, or Soul, which she executed in Oaxaca in 1976, she appropriated the Mexican tradition of fireworks displays by having a bamboo armature made in the shape of her own body, attaching small fireworks to it, and setting them ablaze (pl. 18). As is common in her other works, this piece displays both the intensity and the transience of life. In it, her body, or more accurately, her soul, is made of air, smoke, heat, and light. It breathes oxygen; it burns in a desirous, powerful, dangerous consumption. The work is a thrilling exultation of the body, a celebration of life’s power and fragility in which the body is as intangible as light, as difficult to capture as smoke. As in a magic trick, her body appears to go up in flames that divert our attention from her disappearance. Through this sleight of hand, her corporeality and her identity are illusions. The only certainty is that she is gone.
