MATEO
GUTIÉRREZ
Your Capitalism Is Fucking Killing Us
A series of 6 hand-embroidered portraits derived from when an artist and a sociologist join hands.
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Jasmin and I 2025: our first in person meeting in Toronto at the University of Guelph
Solidarity and Resistance in a Violent World
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In 2026 I will be continuing my collaboration with sociologist Jasmin Hristov. We are planning to return to Mexico to meet with the FNLS movement in Chiapas where I will lead a banner/tapestry making workshop and be allowed to participate in the celebration of their 20 year anniversary, which is an incredible privilege and honor.
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Jasmin Hristov is a leading expert on violence and land dispossession in Latin America who is an Associate Professor of Sociology and International Development Studies at the University of Guelph, Canada and the Principal Investigator of the project “Land Violence, Security, and Development in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico”. She reached out in 2024 via Instagram, having taken an interest in my work, and I had no idea that this would lead to where I am today, working in collaboration with her to define new ideas and new artistic + academic territory for how artists and academics can work together to create real change and inform the larger world of their interests and concerns in the world.
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Since 2024 Jasmin and I have had several enriching conversations where we realized that our crossover in thinking and concerns about the world was remarkable and important. She invited me to Toronto to speak to her class at the University of Guelph and also at CERLAC (Center for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean), York University. I happily agreed and gave two presentations in Toronto in 2025. I talked about how the concept of American violence, which is the central theme of my work, was something I was trying to address artistically. Her students were receptive and open and asked great questions. The experience at CERLAC was equally rewarding. Speaking to a group of renowned specialists on Latin American history, politics, sociology and more was an honor I will never forget. ​
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Me 2025: giving a talk to Jasmin's sociology class at the University of Guelph
Subsequently, Jasmin and I knew that engaging in something collaborative would empower us to advance towards our shared goal. We discussed ideas on how to bridge art and sociology. What we understood was that Jasmin's work on land dispossession and violence has unmistakable overlap with my work as an artist looking at the violent psychology and ramifications of American culture and society, but how could we bring these two different modalities together in a meaningful way? We decided that I should join her on a trip to Mexico City in 2025 to meet members of the FNLS (Frente Nacional de Lucha por el Socialismo), a coalition of movements with whom Jasmin has worked for the past eight years. This was both a tremendously generous and trusting gift from Jasmin, for me, as an artist, to be granted access to a world she had carefully cultivated for years, nurturing a level of trust that would allow me to piggyback in and also be trusted with making work about the profoundly painful struggle of FNLS. Out of this unforgettable journey to Mexico City to meet with FNLS and simply listen and absorb the incredible work that Jasmin was doing, and meet the unbelievably courageous people behind the FNLS movement, I formed an idea for a series of hand-embroidered portraits of people from the FNLS movement who had been "forcibly disappeared". FNLS trusted me to make this work, and that in itself has been the greatest honor of this project. In addition, Jasmin and I are now working through ideas for combining our expertise in the most beneficial ways to support the needs of the communities that form part of the FNLS. One such idea is a possible workshop I would hold in rural Mexico where I would work with members of the FNLS community to make a large tapestry that they can take to public events, showing their struggle, those whose lives were lost and more. Another initiative that Jasmin and I came up with is a joint exhibition which would blend research findings from her project, live testimonies from FNLS members, and my artwork all together in solidarity to inform, educate and hopefully shape a future free of land dispossession and violence. That is certainly my goal: an end to the violence in a manner that truly solves the needs and desires of the victims of violence, not the perpetrators. ​
Mexico City 2025: meeting with the FNLS in their home base.
Out of Jasmin's & my collaboration I was given permission by the FNLS to use public images of members of their community who had been disappeared. It is an important distinction to make about the images being in the public domain and yet seeking permission on my part. If I were not able to work with Jasmine and therefore be trusted by the FNLS to produce artwork about them in a manner that is both respectful and in alignment with their core values, then I would simply be another person in a long line of people who are exploiting the Indigenous people of Mexico. It is a tremendous honor to have their blessing, and an essential element in me being able to make this work from a morally justifiable position, and I have this collaboration and Jasmin in particular to thank for that.
I settled on an idea for a series of six hand-embroidered portraits of people who have been "disappeared", and put those images into an AI imaging tool to transform them into a scream, so that the person would appear to be screaming instead of as they originally are with closed mouths. I wanted to give them a chance to "come back to life" through the work and scream at the world. The title of the series is "YCIFKU" which stands for "your capitalism is fucking killing us". This is a vulgar and brutal title, and that is intentional, because this was my greatest take-away from this experience of meeting with the FNLS, which is that they have been and continue to be brutalized in the most horrible of ways, and yet most, if not all, of the world is deaf. We, in the global north, are not hearing them; we are not hearing their suffering, and we are causing it, our ways, our consumption, our endless fascination with capital and wealth, and this makes us fundamentally complicit. As always, I want my work to generate a strong emotional response, and in this instance I want that emotional response to be a mix of horror, concern, fear and also shame (on us in the global north).
Below are some very early images and videos I have shared on Instagram from the series, which is being produced during my residency at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn NY between the months of September 2025 and August 2026, and will be exhibited at the Textile Arts Center in September of 2026 in a group show, exact dates TBA.
