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Kiyo Gutiérrez, nepantlera, 2025. Film Still. © and courtesy the artist. Selected for AFI'26 by LACE,Los Angeles,USA.

Kiyo Gutiérrez

nepantlera

(2025) 13:14 minutes

Selected for AFI'26 by LACE, Los Angeles, US.

'nepantlera' is an experimental video that documents a series of ritual-performances activated in specific locations along the bodies of water that delineate the border between México and the United States, that is the Gulf of México, the Rio Bravo/Grande River, the Colorado River, the Gila River, The Tijuana River and the Pacific Ocean.

La nepantlera, a being/force/goddess/extinct creature embarks on a mythical journey to communicate with the waters that she gave birth to in ancient times. But she soon finds out that the rivers have been raped, and their waters have been partitioned by ambitious unsatiable men. Throughout la nepantlera’s pilgrimage, which begins at the mouth of the Rio Bravo/Grande River in Brownsville, Texas, and concludes at the Pacific Ocean in Tijuana, México, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the historical document that turned these waters into borders, is transgressed, transformed, and consumed through gestures such as marking, sound-making, ripping, chewing, salivating, and soaking. These gestures, involving natural dye, voice, rattle sounds, saliva, ocean and river water, touch, alter, and erode the treaty’s imperialist pages, challenging its authority and reimagining its significance.

This project was crafted out of a deep concern for the land and human violence that occurs daily in the border, while also considering this space as a complex multilayered watery place where resistance, reciprocity, memory, stories and new possibilities arise.

Curatorial Text / Statement:

LACE selected Kiyo Gutiérrez’s experimental film nepantlera (2025) to represent AFI’26’s theme of “A Kind of Power.” In her film, Gutiérrez embodies Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the powerful goddess-like figure of the nepantlera (a boundary-crosser who lives in and navigates transitional spaces of identity, culture, and political borders, facilitating movement “between worlds” to elicit healing and connection) and challenges the history of border violence through the symbolism and historical disputes of bodies of water that today represent physical political borders between Mexico and the United States.

- LACE Curator and Director of Programs Selene Preciado.

Photo: Rafael Ramos

Artist Link

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. 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 participated in Irrational Exhibits 13 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.

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