Photography by Amina Cruz

mojada, 2026
Performance presented at the Feminist Center for Creative Work, Los Angeles, on July, 2026 part of the exhibition Radical Kinship curated by Chloë Flores.
Zip-tie handcuffs, ice, tarp, maize, soil

"Ice melts onto Kiyo Gutiérrez’s bare back. She lies in child’s pose, nude and face down on the gallery floor beneath two massive ice blocks, suspended from the ceiling. Her arms wrap around her back as if she’s captured, a prisoner, but her hands hold a tiny plant with six leaves. This two-month-old maize plant may one day be a corn stalk, growing taller than your average person, but for now, it’s living in the handful of soil between Gutiérrez’s fingers, and watered by drips from above." excerpt from Patty Gone's text documentation of the performance

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. Excerpt from Chloë Flores' text.

"What initially, when one first entered, appeared to be a pristine tableau of natural elements (body, plant, water) now shows its wear. After looking for ten minutes, fifteen, time is perceivable by clocking how these elements affect each other. The pool at her feet takes on a brown parlor as drips mix with the dirt from her back. Her breathing gets heavier and audible for the first time, and she releases a large exhale directly into a puddle, her air scattering the water. The ice changes too. The two blocks, stacked atop each other, are suspended four or five feet off the ground by a bramble of thick black zip ties, as if claws were cradling the ice. The amount of wet plastic and their arrangement in this dense and wild cluster leads them to resemble a tangle of black patent leather. They branch out sharply in all directions, a spiked torture device, transporting our setting away from a gallery and closer to a secret military prison or kink dungeon. As the ice liquifies, the black straps impress themselves upon the blocks, carving grooves and turning what were once perfect rectangles into records of natural erosion." excerpt from Patty Gone's text documentation of the performance

Photography by Amina Cruz