banana plantations (2023 – ongoing)

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preserved United Fruit Company engineering house in Prado Sevilla, Magdalena. Field research, 2024.

Unknown photographer, “Sevilla Prado-Engineering office in the foreground, circa 1925”, 8×10 inches, United Fruit Company Photograph Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School. [UF76.035, ID 4089306]

Master thesis, HFBK Hamburg 2024
Wartsaal Wipkingen, Zürich 2023

This project seeks to investigate the intersection between agricultural production, global trade, migration, and colonialism, exploring how these issues are symbolically inscribed in visual representation. The starting point was the observation that in Germany, fruits and vegetables are labeled with their place of origin. Although banana production is restricted to tropical areas, such as the Colombian Caribbean, it is a common and easily available product worldwide. This localized production has historically been associated with different types of violence, such as the colonial expansion of the United Fruit Company in the Caribbean.

So far, the project has consisted of fieldwork in banana-growing regions in Colombia and research into the photographic archive of the United Fruit Company, both depicted here. The main question focuses on the idea of a perceptual contradiction and a problem of representation, where what is seen in an image differs from what is known, and omitted about the context of that visual representation.

exhibition view, wartsaal wipkingen, zürich

some images combining field research documentation and archival images of the same locations from the UFC Archive.

a qerman banana's traceability qr code (left) and the Colombian farm it points to (right).