Jessica Kairé, is a guatemalan artist of jewish descent based in New York. Deploys food, textiles, and other forms of craft in projects that call for public’s participation and that unravel a bitter-sweet commentary on the issues of gender, national, and regional identity. Under the veil of acerbic humor, the videos from the series Such is Life in the Tropics and the soft sculptures collectively entitled CONFORT speak to pervasive violence that permeates Guatemala’s everyday life. Appropriating the format of a TV cooking show, Such is Life in the Tropics can be seen as the updating of Martha Rosler’s iconic feminist video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) for the context of contemporary “tropical” Guatemala. Starring the country’s native fruits as the means to construct do-it-yourself self-defense weapons, Kairé’s videos, as well as her plush, squeezy objects, serve both as a denunciation of violence and as a refusal to subject to the fear of it.