Wednesday, July 1, 7–9:30PM
FCCW: 3053 Rosslyn St. LA, CA 90065
Info on our space here
Max Participants: 40
Free
In mojada, Spanish for “wet,”Kiyo Gutiérrez stages the body as both archive and infrastructure, bearing the sedimented histories of migration, labor, and racialized language. Drawing from Mesoamerican cosmovision, in which humans are made of maize, the work situates the body within a cosmology of land-based kinship rather than nationalist borders. Referencing the slur “wetback” and its violent immigration history, the performance transforms water from a mark of criminalization into a force of memory, endurance, and regeneration.
Special thanks to Metabolic Studio and Lauren Bon for the maize seeds from Not A Cornfield, planted on Mother’s Day 2026 within the ancestral homelands of the Gabrielino/Tongva Nation and near the Arroyo Seco. Grown from these seeds, the young maize plant appearing in mojada emerges from a longer lineage of ecological remediation and land-based practice, carrying forward ongoing cycles of cultivation, migration, and return to the land. Lauren Bon’s Not A Cornfield (2005–2006) existed for one agricultural cycle: a million kernels of corn sown, tended, and harvested to remediate a brownfield site alongside the Los Angeles River. At the time, even though water from the LA River was considered surplus and allowed to flow out to sea, California water laws prohibited diverting that water to nourish crops, extracting toxicity from the soil. That changed with Bending the River. Since 2005, Metabolic Studio has continued growing corn as an ongoing ecological and cultural practice that has helped heal soil at both Un-development 1 and Un-development 2, carrying forward the legacy of remediation, renewal, and relationship to land through each agricultural cycle.
Flyer photo credit: Pistor Orendain
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kiyo Gutiérrez is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist. Trained in history, she turned to performance to explore the body’s potential as a tool of resistance. Her work emerged as a response to Mexico’s brutal realities: femicide, disappearances, and environmental devastation. Her ritual-performances often integrate archival research, sculpture, textile, sound and audience participation. Her work reexamines the construction of colonial history, uncovering how bodies and materials themselves bear the traces of extraction, exploitation, resistance and transformation. She is interested in the possibility of multispecies alliances and has collaborated with damaged bodies of water, pollinators and burnt forests. Kiyo performs in public spaces and has participated in Performance Festivals and exhibitions in México, Brasil, Colombia, Bolivia, Spain, Italy and the United States. She has participated in Irrational Exhibits 13: Debates, an editorial project for Colección Cisneros, and is an alum of Georgetown University’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics. Kiyo is a recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund, the Macomber Travel Grant, the Fulbright Scholarship, and was nominated for the Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award. She received her MFA in Fine Arts at the Roski School of Arts of the University of Southern California.