nepantlera
Details
Artist: Kiyo Gutiérrez
Title: nepantlera
Year: 2025
Duration: 13 minutes 14 seconds
Medium: Single-channel experimental video
Credit: Kiyo Gutiérrez, nepantlera, 2025. Photography and video by Pistor Orendain. Music by Angel Deradoorian Courtesy and © the Artist. Selected for AFI'26 by LACE, Los Angeles, US.
nepantlera (2025)
Kiyo Gutiérrez Selected 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in Brownsville, Texas, and concludes at the Pacific Ocean in Tijuana, México, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the historical document that turned these waters into borders, is transgressed, transformed, and consumed through gestures such as marking, sound-making, ripping, chewing, salivating,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.
Kiyo Gutiérrez, nepantlera, 2025. Film Still. © and courtesy the artist. Selected for AFI'26 by LACE, Los Angeles, USA.
LACE, Los Angeles, say:
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.
Artist Q&A
What does a democratic, international film programme such as Artists' Film International, mean to you as an artist?
A democratic, international programme like Artists’ Film International feels to me like a space of crossing, of languages, bodies, and geographies that don’t usually meet, or are often kept apart. It’s important because it allows a plurality of voices to coexist, and because it opens the possibility for works to be read from multiple and different contexts, not just the one they were created in.
I’m also interested in how stories travel, how they transform as they move and resonate differently depending on who is experiencing the work. A programme like this creates the conditions for that kind of movement, for a film like nepantlera, which is deeply rooted in specific borderlands, waters, and histories, to enter into dialogue with other works and audiences across the world.
It also feels political. In a moment where borders are increasingly policed and controlled, the circulation of images, voices, and embodied knowledges becomes a form of resistance. To be part of a platform that values exchange, difference, and accessibility is to participate in a collective space that challenges isolation and invites connection.
What compels you to work with moving image, and when did you first become interested in the medium?
As a performance artist, the moving image has always been present in my practice. At the beginning, I saw it primarily as a form of documentation, a way of registering ephemeral actions that would otherwise disappear. But with time, my relationship to film shifted. I began to understand the moving image not just as a record, but as a space of possibility.
Moving image allows me to defy the constraints of the real, to materialize images, gestures, and temporalities that might be impossible to sustain in a live context. In video, there is room for error, you can reshoot the image. In performance, if something goes “wrong,” it cannot be undone; it becomes part of the work, whether intended or not. Which is also valuable, but I enjoy working with both possibilities.
What also compels me to work with moving image is the collaborative dimension. Film opens a space to work alongside others, sound specialists, videographers, editors, each bringing their own sensibility and knowledge into the process. These exchanges enrich the work, it becomes something layered and complex, a collective practice.
This year’s theme, A Kind of Power, brings together films which explore the ethics of looking, watching and witnessing. In a world where images circulate instantly and visibility can both empower and endanger, how do you navigate the responsibility of looking - and of asking others to look - in your work?
For me, intuition plays a central role in how I navigate the ethics of looking. I don’t begin with a fixed image or a predetermined narrative; instead, I allow the work to unfold gradually, guided by a process of presence and listening, both to the place and to the beings and materials involved. This also means approaching each site with care and respect, asking for permission: to be there, to engage, to show.
When I invite others to look, I’m inviting them into that same process of attentiveness. The work doesn’t offer immediate visibility or easy consumption; it asks for time, for openness, for a kind of witnessing that acknowledges uncertainty. Letting the story unravel without fully knowing where it will lead is, for me, a way of resisting control and allowing more ethical, more reciprocal forms of image-making to take shape.
Please share a list of books, music, films, artworks, thinkers, spaces and places that inspire your practice, and in particular have fed into your thinking around this film.
Light in the Dark by Gloria Anzaldúa, Sonar wildly and Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza, Ch’ixi World Is Possible: Essays from a Present in Crisis by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Bastard Feminism by María Galindo, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Barad’s “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” and Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology.
What new projects or lines of research are currently preoccupying you?
I’m currently working on a project that focuses on humedales, that is wetlands, as fertile, transitional spaces where different forms of life, matter, and temporalities converge. I’m interested in wetlands not only as ecological sites, but as political and symbolic territories: spaces that are often dismissed, drained, or erased, yet are essential for sustaining life.
This research connects to my ongoing interest in water and the ways in which bodies, human and more-than-human, are entangled through hydrological systems. Wetlands, in particular, resist fixed boundaries; they are neither fully land nor fully water, but something in between.
That in-betweenness resonates with my broader exploration of liminality, borderlands, and states and potentiality of transformation.
Details
Artist: Kiyo Gutiérrez
Title: nepantlera
Year: 2025
Duration: 13 minutes 14 seconds
Medium: Single-channel experimental video
Credit: Kiyo Gutiérrez, nepantlera, 2025. Photography and video by Pistor Orendain. Music by Angel Deradoorian Courtesy and © the Artist. Selected for AFI'26 by LACE, Los Angeles, US.