Kiyo Gutiérrez bocas indomables/untamable mouths
1262 Palmetto Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013
Thursday, April 17 at 6:00 PM 9:00 PM
Ends Apr 25, 2025
bocas indomables/untamable mouths is an installation that creates embodied experiences of materials, mythologies, mother-goddesses, writings, dreams and sounds from rebel and disobedient water, creatures, and women that wildly speak from the cracks between worlds. If water has memory, then to tap into its substances means that we can still hear the rushing voices of the things—ancient and future—interrupted and displaced. bocas indomables/untamable mouths is based on a series of ritual-performances that were activated in collaboration with the L.A. River and the border rivers between Mexico and the United States. Informed by matter’s dynamism and agency, multispecies collaboration, indigenous knowledge, and speculative fabulation, this multidisciplinary project offers alternatives to our dominant water imaginaries and aims to build a closer relationship between bodies of water, humans, and the creatures that inhabit them. Through wearable sculpture, installation, video, sound, photography, and natural dyeing, this exhibition invites audiences to rethink materiality, reflect on the ways colonial history is constructed, and reconsider how we craft and share stories. bocas indomables/untamable mouths weaves together the stories of the Pacific Lamprey, a jawless fish native to the L.A. River but now extinct; of La Malinche, the enslaved Nahua woman who served as an interpreter for the Spanish conqueror Cortés during the colonization process in what is now Mexico; and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which arbitrarily designated the Rio Grande, the Colorado River and the Gila River as borders. On view gallery hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 5pm, and by appointment by contacting kiyoguti@usc.edu