Luis Gutierrez

In Las Nueve Demandas (2023) (The Nine Demands), Colombian artist Luis A. Gutiérrez reconstructs a pivotal yet often silenced episode in Latin American labor history: the 1928 banana workers’ strike in Ciénaga, Colombia, which ended in a massacre ordered by the government under pressure from the United Fruit Company. The installation comprises nine suspended canvases—each corresponding to one of the workers’ unmet demands—stitched and layered with oil, acrylic, and silkscreened archival images. Visitors walk among these panels as if moving through fragments of memory, where the vivid orange and red pigments evoke both the fruit and the violence that marked its production.

By combining industrial screen-printing with intimate hand-sewing, Gutiérrez bridges collective and personal modes of making. The physical layering of paint and fabric becomes an act of repair, countering erasure through material accumulation. The repetition of historical images—workers in the fields, soldiers, cargo trains—transforms documentary fragments into poetic testimony, confronting the aesthetic legacies of imperialism and labor exploitation.

Beyond the gallery space, Las Nueve Demandas extended into public dialogue through community panels and discussions organized by the artist at The Shed. In reanimating this history of struggle “in the absence of unions,” Gutiérrez connects the 1928 demands to present-day movements for workers’ rights across global supply chains. His work invites us to see the fight for dignity and justice not as a closed chapter, but as a demand that continues to reverberate through the very infrastructures that sustain everyday consumption.