Jíbaro: the sticker that comes from the bottom of the river

⏲ 4 min read

This is the quietest design in the catalog. It doesn't yell. It doesn't threaten. It's not here to scare anyone. It just exists. Eyes closed, mouth sewn shut, with the infinite patience of something that no longer needs to speak. Jíbaro is a sticker that keeps secrets — and it does it on purpose.

The tsantsa and the Shuar people

The word jíbaro is a Spanish corruption of what conquistadors called the indigenous peoples of Ecuador and Peru's Amazon — especially the Shuar, the warriors who practiced head-shrinking. Tsantsas are those shrunken heads: the head of a defeated enemy, prepared through a precise ritual that could take days. But this wasn't a war trophy in the Western sense. It was something more complicated.

The Shuar believed that by shrinking a head, they captured the dead enemy's vengeful spirit — the mésak — and forced it to serve the victor. That's why the lips were sewn shut: so the soul couldn't escape or see. The tsantsa was a talisman. An amulet. A way of turning your most dangerous enemy into your most loyal guardian. I find that beautiful and terrible at the same time.

Then the 19th century arrived and the West got obsessed. They collected tsantsas. Sold them. Displayed them in museums. Demand got so high that counterfeits appeared — made from morgue corpses, monkey skin, goat leather. Around 80% of tsantsas in museums and private collections are fake. Tourists paid with firearms — one gun per authentic head. The Shuar handed them over. And eventually the Shuar went to war with each other because collectors in New York and London couldn't get enough.

That also says something about the West. And about who gets to name whom.

The design

My Jíbaro isn't an ethnographic representation of an actual tsantsa. It's the idea of one. It's the feeling those objects give me — that mix of respect, discomfort, and fascination. A head closed in on itself. Self-contained. As if the outside world no longer mattered to it.

I drew it thinking about silence. About objects that carry stories they're never going to tell. About the difference between being quiet because you have nothing to say and being quiet because you've already said everything and it's pointless to repeat yourself. Jíbaro belongs to the second category.

When the Love, Death & Robots episode "Jíbaro" dropped — the one with the deaf knight and the golden siren by Alberto Mielgo — a lot of people reached out comparing it to my design. Not a coincidence. The episode is about the same thing that interests me: Western greed, what gets lost when you only see the shine of something without understanding what it means. My Jíbaro came first, but the conversation got bigger.

Why Jíbaro doesn't speak

"I drew it like this: eyes closed, mouth sewn shut. Not because it has nothing to say. Because it already said everything it needed to say."

Jíbaro is the quietest design in the catalog. It's not the darkest or the most violent. It's the most present. There's something about it that makes you look a little longer. Makes you wonder what it's holding. Makes you notice the detail in the hair, the sewn lips, the expression that's neither pain nor peace but something in between that I don't have a good word for.

I like that it doesn't hit you immediately. I like designs you have to earn.

Matte laminated vinyl.