Speed Kills is a ceramic installation born from grief and inquiry into what happens when we slow down long enough to confront the lives we have been moving too quickly through to be able to examine.

After her mother’s death, Viteri found herself suspended between profound loss and profound change. A few months leading up to her 47th birthday, Viteri set out to make 47 plates to tell her life story while attempt to make sense of it all.

Far from mere illustrations of grief, the plates became its antidote: evidence of endurance, transformation, and the possibility of becoming. The exhibit is divided into 6 distinct series, each examining a different period in Gaby’s life.

Hand-built using ordinary kitchen tools, the plates became both domestic objects and personal archives. Their raw edges, images, words, and accompanying stories hold fragments of memory, family, motherhood, love, loss, humor, identity, and inheritance.

Installed within the domestic setting of her kitchen, the work evolved beyond personal autobiography through its interaction with viewers. Visitors encountering the stories embedded in individual pieces began responding with stories of their own. The installation became a community confessional: a participatory space in which vulnerability generated vulnerability and private experience became collective exchange.

Through this exchange, Speed Kills considers storytelling as a form of material and social practice. By approaching difficult histories with honesty, humor, and irreverence, the work seeks to decentralize pain and shame, allowing them to be witnessed rather than concealed.

What began as an individual process of grief ultimately became an investigation into the capacity of art to transform private experience into collective recognition.