 Now we will get started. Again, thank you so much for joining us. Again, I'm Cecily Cullen, the director and curator of the Center for Visual Art of Metropolitan State University of Denver. As the off-campus art center for MSU Denver, the Center for Visual Art acts as a resource for students in the broader community through contemporary exhibitions of local significance and global reach. We also have immersive education programs and workforce development for students interested in creative fields. So I'd like to extend my thanks to the amazing team here at CVA who make all of our programs possible. The Center for Visual Art acknowledges the privilege we have to gather in this place, once the territories and homelands of so many Indigenous people, including the Arapaho and Cheyenne nations, both of whom were subject to genocide and forcibly removed from this land. We acknowledge that the establishment of our campus further dismantled the culture, community, and tradition of this place through the displacement of Latina people who lived and worked in the Auraria neighborhood. We respect the many diverse Indigenous peoples still connected to this land and value the knowledge systems they have developed in relationship to their lands. We collectively understand that offering a land acknowledgement neither absolves settler colonial privilege nor diminishes colonial structures of violence. Land acknowledgments must be accompanied with ongoing commitments to displaced Indigenous and immigrant communities. In order to learn more about the spatial relationships of Indigenous communities to lands, we recommend visiting native-land.ca. There are many ways to support Indigenous people today, including through local organizations such as the Denver Indian Center and the Denver Indian Family Resource Center. The Banana Craze Exhibition presents, excuse me, some of the food justice problems facing Latin America and the Caribbean today, but it also serves as a poignant reminder for us to think critically about our everyday actions. This exhibition demonstrates what happens locally, reverberates on a global scale. Banana Craze brings to light the injustices to people on the planet when profits are prioritized over social justice. Through poetics, humor, and rigorous research, the artists in Banana Craze provoke dialogue about human rights, health, economics, and ecological concerns while inspiring us to question the status quo. I am delighted to introduce the curators of Banana Craze. Juanira Solano Roa is assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the Universidad de los Andes. Blanca Serrana Ortiz de Solorzano is project director at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art. Both are specialists in modern and contemporary art from Latin America and have PhDs in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts NYU. Juanira and Blanca are co-authors of the Digital Humanities Project Banana Craze. This project has been reviewed in the international press, including El País in Spain, El Universal Mexico, and Hyperallergic in the United States, and has obtained third place in the International Digital Humanities Award in 2021. Together they have curated the exhibition's Banana Craze here at the Center for Visual Art and Bitter Bites, Tracing the Fruit Market in the Global South at Tutifritos Gallery and Project Space in New York in 2017. Their research has published in the Museum of Modern Arts online journal, Post, Notes on Art in a Global Context, and in the upcoming edited volumes, Nourish and Resist, Food and Feminisms in Contemporary Global Caribbean Art, New Haven, Yale University Press 2023, and Digital Humanities in Latin America, Bogota Universidad de Los Andes 2023. So with that, I welcome our two curators, and I just must say it's been such a pleasure to work with you, and I am thrilled to have you here today and can't wait to hear what you have to say. So welcome Juanira and Blanca. Thank you so much, Cecily, for the invitation to participate in this project. We have been having, we're delighted to have worked with the whole team, even though we did this online. It has been a pleasure to meet everyone, and we are really happy to be here sharing our project with you. So I'm going to share my screen now, and okay, can you see my screen? Okay, so since I cannot see you, I assume I can, you can, you can see my screen. So this is our project. As Cecily said, this is a project Blanca and I co-curated together, and this began as a digital humanities project. So the presentation that we're going to give today has four points. First, I'm going to start telling you a little bit about bananas, why we decided to work on bananas, a little bit of its history. Then Blanca is going to show you the project, the online project that we have, and then Rochelle and Maria Jose are going to present their artworks. And finally, we're going to have a short conversation with them, and if anyone from the public wants to join the conversation, you're more than welcome to do so. So why bananas? Well, bananas are everywhere. I just chose two examples where you can find bananas in popular culture. You're probably familiar with Mojito Catalan's Comedian piece from 2019, where he taped a banana on the wall in Art Basel, Miami, and this became this huge attraction for many people at the art fair. People went there to pictures with the banana. The artist was kind of provoking the art system through such a simple gesture. It was sold for $150,000, and bananas became popular again in the art world through this particular piece. But in the early 20th century, bananas became really popular through the figure of Carmen Miranda. She is a Brazilian actor and singer who became very popular in Hollywood during the 1940s and 50s. Some of her videos and movies were really, really popular among the public, especially in the US. And as you probably know, she used the trope of this exotic Brazilian woman to sell her image. So I just wanted to show you a very, very short part of this video, where she has, there's this banana set. I think you can watch the whole video online. It's really fun to see. But bananas were not this popular by the end of the 19th century, and that's the story that I really want to tell you very quickly. So actually, bananas were practically unknown in the US, and they became the super popular food through the efforts of big banana companies, such as the United Free Company, which was the first one to have plantations in Latin American and the Caribbean. And this guy that I am showing you here, Minor Cooper Keith, he's one of the founders of the United Fruit Company. He was a businessman from New York, who moved to Costa Rica to build the railroad. He was part of the family of this big railroad builder, and he was in charge of joining the city of San Jose, the capital city of Costa Rica with the port of Puerto Limón. Of course, this was a really, really hard thing to do. Everything had to be done manually in the middle of the jungle. I'm showing you here. Sorry, I'm going to jump. Okay, no, I deleted that slide. Sorry. So he had to he had to work in the middle of the jungle with people from Costa Rica, but also people that were coming from different parts of the world. And they did this, as I said, manually. It was very hard and very difficult. And one thing that he noticed was that he could feed the workers with bananas. This plant grew very easily in this environment, and it was very nourishable. It was cheap. So he began to connect the dots. And very quickly he realized that he could make the banana a very big business. He couldn't do this by himself. So he decided to join forces with these two persons, Andrew Preston, who was the owner of the Boston Food Company in the United States. He had already a whole system for distributing fruits. And with Captain Lorenzo Dow Baker, who was shaping bananas from the Caribbean, from Jamaica to the US, small amounts, but he knew how to transport them. Because Miner Cooper Keith, he had the ability to grow the bananas in Central America, but he had to figure out how to take the bananas from Central America and the Caribbean to the US. So through these alliance, they formed what we know today as the United Fruit Company. I'm showing here you one of the first logos that they had, which the gun right there in the middle speaks about the history of violence that will be related to this company. Very quickly, they expanded throughout Central America, the north of South America, and the Caribbean. Here I'm showing you two maps. This one is from the 1920s. This one is a little bit earlier, but you can see all the shipping lines that they had at this time. They were not only transporting bananas, but also people. They turned this into a tourism industry as well, bringing people from the US to the Caribbean, and then shipping bananas from the Caribbean to the US. We like to show these maps because they speak a little bit about this notion of manifest destiny. You can see it very clearly in the gestures of the hands of these men here and the woman on the top of this map. We can start to see these imperial ideas that were behind such a big company. Why bananas? Bananas are attractive because of their natural color. Anyone working in advertisement knows that black and yellow are very, very attractive colors, and the bananas have them by themselves. They're also very easy to transport because they have this protective peel. They are nutritious, and of course, they're very, very cheap. That's why bananas became such a food staple in the international business. Banana consumption today is very, very high. It's the fruit that we consume the most around the world. To give you a couple of figures in the US, the average person consumes 130 bananas per year. That's a lot of bananas if you think that the US has more than 300 million people, and that's only the US. You can see the figures for Europe and Canada here, yourselves. We also like to show how this economy works, because it's an economy of scale. This map is showing us the places where bananas are produced around the world. Of course, Southeast Asia is where most bananas are produced, and this is followed by Central and South America, as you can see here. What is really interesting is when you compare this map with the scale of consumption. As you can see in Southeast Asia, the bananas that are produced here are mostly consumed locally. Whereas in Latin America, the green dots become smaller, and they begin to spread around the global north, meaning that Latin America is the biggest producer of export bananas in the world. We'd like to show this, because it's very telling. Ecuador is the largest producer of bananas today, followed by the Philippines, and then all the next countries that appear in this chart are Latin American countries, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Colombia, Panama, Honduras, Mexico. So it is definitely the center of banana production for the rest of the world. Now there are some problems with this, and one of the most concerning problems has to do with the monoculture. What is a monoculture? It means that only one variety of bananas are being planted, and this brings many issues because the plants can get sick, basically. So whereas we have more than a thousand banana varieties, we began planting just one, and this makes the diseases spread very easy, and that's exactly what happened with the first variety of bananas that was planted massively. That was the cross-Michael variety of bananas, and you can probably think of the flavor of candies, banana candies. That flavor comes from these variety of bananas, and it is kind of strange to us today, precisely because we are not familiar with this banana anymore. Actually, it was attacked by a disease called the Panama disease, and big companies began to plant a new type of banana. That's the Cavendish variety. That's the one we consume today, the one we are familiar with, and the problem is that this variety is beginning to be attacked by Panama disease as well. The impact of the monoculture in ecosystems is very, very high. Blanca is going to tell you a little bit more about that, and she's going to show you the project that we designed online. So I'm going to stop here, and I'm going to give Blanca. Don't worry. Thank you so, so much, Vanita, and thank you, Cecily, for the invitation, and everyone at the team at the CVA Art Center at MNZU Denver. It's a pleasure to be part of this project, and thank you again for the opportunity to hold the exhibition there and also to be part of this public program. I'm going to share a screen, and I'm going to very quickly, for the sake of time, because I think we're a bit, what's the word, like, we're not ahead of time. It's the opposite of that. We are a bit delayed. I want to give the behind, thank you. I want to give the artist enough time to present their works because it's a wonderful and unique opportunity to listen to them. So I'll share a screen now and walk you very briefly through our Digital Humanities project. Please let me know if you can see my screen. Is it working? Yes. Awesome. Thank you. So as Vanita already mentioned, Banana Craze, or La Fiebre del Banana in Spanish, is a Digital Humanities project that is composed of a virtual exhibition, a virtual archive, and an online public program series. So as an online exhibition, one is created by a curatorial text at the beginning of the show, and then one may enter one of the three galleries or the exhibition rooms within the exhibition. These divide the works thematically, so their works that belong to the category of violences, others that are under ecosystems, and others that are under identities. Just very briefly, the works by Latin American artists and Caribbean artists in this project that are under violences respond mostly to the long-term effects of the presence of the United Food Company in Central America. Mostly, labor struggles, abuse of power, their connections with the CIA, in the topping of governments, all of those histories of violence. And the works in the Gallery of Identities work with the stereotype of the Banana Republic and with impersonation of the stereotype sort of in the figure of Carmen Miranda as Tiquita Banana, the UFC logo, as I'm sure you all well know. And most of the works in this section are works by migrant artists who are based in the U.S., but originate from Central America and the Caribbean, and they resort to the icon of the banana as a shared identity that used to be pejorative that is now exhibited with pride. And defy stereotypes around the Latin American body as being hypersexual, lazy, etc. But I'm going to focus on the section of ecosystems. As Juanita mentioned, the works in this section relate to the problems of the monoculture, which are many and include but are not limited to the not diversification of the economy, because agriculture is just centered in producing one produce instead of several. The diet restrictions related to this, the waste of water that is tied to the banana plantations, and also, and perhaps most importantly, the use of pesticides, which lead to breathing conditions and reproductive problems as well and infertility. So, as in any other section of the project, you are also greeted by a text that explains this particular theme within the exhibition, and then one may browse the works that are under this section. So, I don't think it makes sense to go through them because a selection of nine of these works is already at Denver in the exhibition, and we're going to have two brilliant artists present their works today, but this is just to show you how the website and the exhibition is structured. So, let's see if this loads. The exhibition might be browsed thematically. Here I'm going to show you like the mosaic of the 100 works that compose the exhibition. Each of them, as I just showed you, include one or several images, an artwork caption, and a description. And here are the 100 works that compose the project, and we plan to add 50 more works next to spring and upload this new bunch of projects to the database. So, one could browse the exhibition thematically, but one could also look at these corpus of works as a database, a database or an archive, which can also be examined alphabetically by artist's last name, but can also be studied chronologically and geographically. The project starts with the iconic photograph by Raúl Corrales that depicts guerrilla fighters from the Cuban Revolution celebrating the expropriation of the last UFC plantation in Cuba. We thought it was an iconic moment to start this project, as this works defies the presence of the UFC in the area. And also it's 1960, it's the beginning of conceptualisms and of leftist governments in Latin America. So, it starts here and it goes through 2021. And the beauty of this for us is that its individual visitor or user of the website may draw his or her own conclusions from looking at the chronology. For example, one could examine whether the works in the 70s and 80s relate to dictatorships in Latin America in relation to the trope of the Banana Republic. Or whether in the 2010s, younger artists are working with preoccupations that are related to ecology and the environment. Similarly, by looking at the map feature, one can browse these works geographically and see, for example, if in Colombia, most of the works relate to the 1928 banana massacre that is famously cited or recollected in 100 years of solitude. And so it is not loading for some reason, but one should be able to see the works per country and see differences and similarities between different nations. And finally, the project also includes a series of online events. We've hosted artist workshops. We've hosted scholars presenting on the topic. We've had artist conversations. We've had a couple of film screenings of documentary films that feature banana plantations. And this is our way of making this project as open as possible, as transversal as possible, and as interactive as possible. The website is and all of the events are always accessible for free to anyone with an internet connection. And the idea is to permit and promote nonlinear histories and studies of the persons of the banana in Latin America, as seen through the spectrum and the culture of the visual arts. And we also regularly update our blog feature and publish academic articles under the publication section. And we also collect all of the mentions to the project in the press, which are happy many. And we also update our bibliography for any scholars who might be interested in the project. So this is Banana Craze. I hope that you browse through their website when you've got time. I encourage you to follow us on Instagram. It's Banana Craze 2021 and to sign up for our newsletter. And it's been a pleasure to show you the project. I'm now going to pass it on to Juanita again. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Blanca. So now I'm going to present Maria Jose Argencio. Maria Jose lives and works in Guadalquil in Ecuador. And having obtained a master's degree from Goldsmiths College, Argencio has since become one of the most distinctive voices within contemporary Latin American art. She was chosen as the official representative of Ecuador for the ninth and 13th editions of the Cuenca Biennial and the 10th edition of the Nicaragua Biennial and was selected by Vanguardia Magazine as one of the 12 most relevant women in the arts in Ecuador. She has had seven important solo exhibitions in her native Ecuador that have positioned her as one of the most relevant figures for generation of Ecuadorian artists. Argencio has exhibited at the Center for Visual Arts in Denver right now, at the Centro Cultural Metropolitano in Quito, at the Museo de Zapopan in Guadalajara, at the Centro de Arte Contemporane in Quito, Espacio Cabo en Bogotá, de Omparo Museum in Puebla, Muach in Mexico City, de Centros Ibeles in Madrid and many, many, many other places that I'm not going to read. Her work is part of private and public collections in Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, Colombia, Spain, Singapore, Australia, Peru and the U.S. And in 2013, she participated in the Lara Program in Cusco and in 2015 in a residency program at the La Cabranca Gallery in Majorca. So it's really a pleasure to have Maria Jose here. She's going to tell us a little bit more about her artwork. Hi, hello, how are you doing? Thanks for everyone who is joining us today and for Blanca and Juanita for making me part of this project, amazing project. And to the CDA people as well. I'm going to start my presentation by asking Jen to play commercial. It's called Banana Chiquita. It's from the 1970s. So Jen, if you can help me out with that, please. Jen, you're muted and we cannot hear the music of the video. Jen, you need to put your sound on, please. Oh, thank you. Eat a banana and I've come to say bananas have to ripen in a certain way when they're flicked with brown and have a golden hue. Bananas taste the best and are the best for you. You can put them in a salad. No, not yet, my dear. That greenish way you're looking means that you are ripe for cooking. How about me? No, no. When you are fully ripe, my dear, those little flecks of brown appear. Your most digestible, my friend. Delicious too, from end to end. You can put them in a pie. Any way you want to eat them. It's impossible to beat them. But bananas like the climate of a very, very tropical equator. So you should never put bananas in the refrigerator. Bananas are a solid food that doctors now include in baby's diet. And since they are so good for babies, I think we all should try it. Okay, so now I'm going to show you. So just please let me know if you can see my screen. Yes, we can, Maria. Okay, so let me just do a full screen mode. I cannot see myself, but as long as you can see my screen is all good. Yes, we're good. Okay, so I'm just going to, we are participating in banana craze in the center of visual arts with a piece that the name of the pieces are the coordinates of Machala. Machala is the capital of a province in Ecuador called El Oro, which means the gold, which is the capital banana of the world. As Juanita has to show you on the presentation, we are the largest, most big and important exporter of bananas in the world. But not just that, banana has become, like for everybody in South America, but especially in Ecuador, part of our identity as well. Like my work has to do with identity and all these sort of things that I'm going to talk to you about. So I'm just going to contextualize my piece and we're talking to you about the piece that is on show that you, I hope, have seen already. And then this other piece that has to do with, as well with the video that I just showed you right now. So I, when I graduated, I did all my, I studied in London, so I did all my academic career in London. So it kind of, my work normally comes from my experience within being a Latin American, but it did change a lot when I did my MA at Goldsmith, that is a really political, a strong political theoretical university. I'm going to time myself, sorry, I think I'll time myself. So I, so when I started Goldsmith, there was this president, left-wing president who came with a speech, an anti-imperialism speech. They came in power, Rafael Correa. He's a really controversial figure in South America, in Ecuador right now. And he wrote this book, who is called Ecuador the Banana, from the Banana Republic to the North Republic. So my work normally comes from putting myself on an Ecuador as an, I don't know, talking about the things that happen in here, but I think they do actually apply to all of South America. So in this book, he normally talks, he talks about various, not just banana, but banana cacao, prongs as well. I'm a daughter of a prong farmer. So it's like different moments in history and industry that has, that make us the country that we are, but not only identity-wise, but as well like economical-wise as well. So like, you know, so it was a reference in this book as well, that he talks about when we dollarize, Ecuador now, since 2000, has the US dollar. And so I take all the things and put in different investigation and put in different words of mine. So I remember when he talks, for example, about the dollar and the dollarization, and this is the notion of novel reason, which means that normally in South America and Ecuador, we normally think that everything that comes from outside is better than the things that we produce and do. And we suffer as well as an artist, because normally people buy or spend a lot of money on art outside, but they wouldn't spend the same amount of money on a South American artist. So he just, I just called this, I did this show after I graduated that I moved from where Kikiton Cuenca, that is called Just Do It, actually talking about this notion of novel reason. And this complex that we have as South Americans, and we're always like thinking, you know, like, you know, the idea of the the American dream, America as calling North America America, but America is actually all of us, but you know, this whole notion of the American dream. And I presented three pieces as installations, and this is one of them. It's the one that you saw first, that's what I'm trying to do. And actually talks about when we got dollarized. So what we did is that what I did, because he talks, obviously, he analyzes in this book about, you know, the economical, Ecuador is one of the most expensive, expensive countries, I think, after Chile of South America because of the dollar. So he talks about the dollarization in the economical terms, but a more, for me, was the part that is important for me is the fact that he says that this was, you know, it was novelism. You know, he was thinking that always like looking for something that came from outside was going to make our economy and our country better. So what I did with this piece, this piece is called 25,000. And so I took 25,000 one secret coins, and I gold plated it. I normally work with gold leaf a lot is a material that I work with, because it's one of the reasons why as well we got colonized, you know, the land, the gold. So it kind of takes us as well to this notion and idea of my work is anti-colonialism, like, you know, criticize all these ideas and way of thinking of people in Ecuador where, you know, we're still living like in colony times that, you know, brings issues with racism, classism, you know, the division of classes. That's what it's important for me to talk about these moments in history of Ecuador where, you know, the people, you know, El Pueblo got promised a better Ecuador, got promised progress, but, you know, it was only a few people that got really rich, for example, with oil. And, you know, so this piece is actually, is because, you know, the generations see it and all these new generations haven't really seen sucre. So this is within the young people, it's normally quite shocking for them to see this piece. It talks about identity, but then as well it talks about, you know, what it really means for us to not have as a nation to use our own currency. Yeah. So then after that piece I did as well on working this piece that is called 1729. It's actually the year where this, as you could see on the coin at the bottom, it says 1929. We have, when Correa came in power, he used the word pelucón, which it means big wins. It's a term that comes from France, it's not a term that he invented it because people in Ecuador think he invented this term. They were your wing, the more political power and money you had. So you show more, you know, wealth and power. So we did have a coin in our coin history, in our currency history called pelucona. This was the coin pelucona. So what I did is like I recreated this win from that is from Felipe V. And I did it with wire, like gold plated copper wire and I put in this pedestal made of guayacán. I normally would use guayacán because it's a wood that represents us as Ecuador, as Ecuadorians. It's like our national kind of more known wood kind of thing as we're talking about identity and stuff like that. And then I'm going to come to you and talk to you about the piece that is on the exhibition right now. And as I told you, the name is the coordinates of Machala. So I'm taking because it's a site specific project. I normally work on a project basis, site specific project basis. That's how it worked. So what I did is that I went to Machala, which is the capital of capital banana of the world. And I gold plated it all this banana with gold. And I took two images, which are the ones that you see on the show. Is this one, which is an image that is being taken from a plane because at this time it was 2010, we didn't have drones. So it's that image is this tree, it's a tree from above. And this image for me is super important because it actually shows wealth. Normally these farms are like loads of acres, 500 acres and it shows wealth, which it makes me think about the division, again, the division of the wealthness, the money, and how much money does the owner of the land earns and how much money does the people that actually works in this corpse makes. So in Ecuador, we have the minimum wage is $400, but what we call a basic basket, which is the minimum money that you need to have in order just to buy the basic food, nothing, you know, like not ham or something like that, it will be like luxury for people, for the pueblo. You need $800. So it's like half the money that you need to survive is the minimum wage. Normally these people earns this amount of money. And how, you know, like the world is like, you know, how badly and is spread. And as you know, we had had to major in Ecuador's major protests with Moreno and now with Lasso. And, you know, it's becoming a kind of a global phenomenon that people are actually asking for a claiming for a vida digna, which is a kind of respectable life, like, you know, so that this image as well makes me think about capitalism and how does this economical form is not actually working. It has never worked, but actually people are actually, you know, demanding changes now because it's impossible to live with under this economical, like having a respectful life living within this economical system. So this piece as well for me brings an order, you know, it's not not identity, the notion of noblerism, but as well the notion of exoticism. I was displaced, I displaced myself, I moved from Ecuador to London to study. So I obviously started to see things on a different way and experienced things in a different way, things that I've already questioned when I was younger, and it came kind of more clear to me. So and for me, it was as well a really big experience to move through London as a Latin American women that I think about kind of like a cliche of a Latin American women, you know, like the capes, leaps, curly hair, brown, and stuff like that. And how do they actually see us as a kind of as a sexual object, like, you know, like the video that we that I just showed you, it was a banana. It was a girl, she was like her, her, you know, you know, if you have, if you're a girl, obviously your chest were out, your breasts were out because she just had a jacket. And it was like this, like, you know, sexual kind of really, that was my time, sexual kind of, but you know, with this like really colorful dress that will take me to this piece Chiquita, I call it Chiquita because of that video, like relating it to this video, to this like traditional dress that is really colorful. And when she arrived on a boat, with this really like big eyelashes on a boat to the first world, all the first world people were boys, they were all on suits, and there was a kid, and the kid was as well a kid, a boy, you know, and she was like really playful, and she was flirty, she was this sexual object moving within this male nominated man, you know, the man in the first world was just the world in the, in the first, the world in the, the first world world was just, you know, full up with men. And we were this kind of like, you know, sexual object that will come around and explain to them how to get a banana, you know, like you can put it in a pie, but you're not right, and you cannot put it in the refrigerator. So it's just kind of become, you know, brings in this notion of exoticism as well, how they actually see us as these, yeah, sexual kind of exotic object. And I'm going to finish there because my time is gone and passed. So I'm going to stop the show screen. Thank you so, so much, Maria Jose, that was fascinating. I'm now going to introduce Rachelle. It's lovely to have you here, Rachelle. Thank you so much for joining, and we've been in touch before, but it's also lovely to finally see you and be in conversation with you. So Rachelle. To interrupt you, Maria Jose, we're still seeing your screen. Okay, now we're good. Thank you. Thank you, Juanita. So Rachelle Motman Solano grew up in New York City and works between New York and Panama. Starting often from her biography and family history, Motman explores how the intersection of history, identity, and positions of power form individual and collective experience. Her work is concerned with the convergence of ideology, mythology, economics, and the psych through photographs and film that explore narrative as inherent to humanity and shaped by perception. Motman's art is deeply informed by her clinical work in psychoanalysis. In 2022, Motman was awarded the Colleen Brown Art Prize in 2021. Motman had a small exhibition of her film. All these things I carry with me at South Bend Museum. In 2020, Motman released her monograph Colonial Echo with Chris Graves Project. And in 2019, Motman had a small exhibition Metamorphosis of Failure at SMAC. And the same year, she was awarded the NYSCA NYFA Artsy Fellowship. Motman has been awarded a New York City Film and Media grant, Urum Foundation Fellowship. And she has held residencies at LMCC Workspace, SMAC Melon, the Camera Club of New York, and Lightwork. Her work has been published in the Lightwork Annual Contact Sheet, Presumed Innocence, Exit Magazine, and many others. So thank you so much for being here with us, Rashaan. It's all yours. Okay, thank you so much. I'm really honored and happy to meet you all in person, sort of virtually, finally, and really happy to meet Maria Jose. That was really fascinating. I'm always really happy to see other artists talk about their work. So because of my own inability, I guess, to share my own screen. I'm going to rely on Jen, who's been kind enough to offer to share her screen of my presentation. I just collected a few images that I wanted to show just in my research process. And then I'll show probably most of the film, or I might ask Jen to cut it to about half. So the film that I made called The Dying Cavendish, I sort of conceptualized around 2016. And it had to be this convergence, it was kind of connected to a convergence of the election and the winning of the election in the US of Donald Trump with my interest in the history of manifest destiny and my interest in the history of US policy in specifically in Panama. And what began to happen was just a lot of reading and understanding of how the United Fruit Company came to exist, how it was essentially stealing land, tricking native people in Costa Rica and Panama to basically really steal their land and in the process murdering a lot of people. And one of the other things that I was really interested in was the history of the gross Michelle banana, which was the banana that Juanita was explaining was the one consumed in the 1950s and then eventually died of Panama disease, even that expression Panama disease was very fascinating to me. So, Jen, if you could just show the next image because it's just part of the research I was doing, which is the way that United Fruit began began really teaching the US public how to eat bananas and this image, and maybe the next one I can't remember how I sequenced them. Well, this is sort of an image that I kind of used as inspiration for the film, but there's a lot of images that I was going through in magazines and cookbooks that United Fruit was publishing to teach the US public how to eat bananas and really not just how to eat them, but to really make them like a daily part of the US consumption and part of the way they did this was through films like The Gang is All Here, which Juanita showed an excerpt of, which shows Carmen Miranda. And I used that film kind of as a basis to talk about American policy. You know, Panama and Central America were known as Middle America at some point and through film, Hollywood film, because the owners of Banana United Fruit, you know, Post-Minor Keith, who founded it, were family and relations to people who were sitting in Congress and really in positions of power and also had big connections to Hollywood film production. So this was all sort of like an ecosystem of power to create profit. And so the banana as a sort of metaphor began to interest me too in terms of the racism that I saw coming up with the election of Donald Trump and the Build the Wall campaign and the irony and the contradiction of that based on the 120 years policy of the US connected very much to United Fruit of using basically Central America and the rest of Latin America to, you know, to exploit them of resources. But then to sort of sell this sort of a kind of a racism based on sort of the preservation of whiteness. And I thought it was really interesting to think about the fact that the bananas that are cultivated are sexless fruit that cannot be planted based on seeds. So basically, and you could keep going, Jen, with okay, so this is just a picture I made that was kind of like a photograph that I tend to work in photographic stills to either influence the films I'll make or I might make the film first and then that will influence sort of how I'm making the still photograph. But I was really interested in the fantasy of presenting minor Keith as a dying Cavendish banana, dying from Panama disease because it said that Panama disease, which is reoccurring and is soon to kill the Cavendish is coming from Australia, it's going to kill off the Cavendish. So there's all these connections between a sexless fruit that is really not based on diversity and the sort of fantasy that I had about how diversity is really the thing that that strengthens us biologically and how this kind of racist ideology around purity and racial purity is really the thing that's killing minor Keith. So it's sort of like this fantasy on that. So we could play some of the film now. Just a moment. Thank you. I think it's also muted. I have my sound on. Can you hear me? I do hear you. Let me try one thing here. Okay. You hear it now. Yeah, I just got a little taste of the music. But if you hear it, it's very low on my end. We had no idea what we were seeing. Couldn't see the details, make out the vast nuances or value the differences of the endless jungle. The Panama disease used to kill everything. The only solution was to get ahold of new lands. So when one farm died off, another was planted. One would die, another was planted. One would die, another was planted. And you see the narrowing genetic culture. That's when you know things are going to die. Do we have C? You're a 10 superior, are we? Well, unfortunately, very laggy. So maybe, Jen, if we confess to the part where there's more dialogue. Essentially, I had this music made for me by a friend who, you know, we listened a lot. The gang is all here and other films that were made, sponsored and funded by United Fruit through Hollywood in the 1940s and kind of based our soundtrack around that. But there's a part if you move a little bit ahead that is more dialogue and so might be less laggy. And also using a lot of sort of the tropes in the gang is all here, you know, like giant bananas. So we could start here and maybe at the end of this scene, we can stop since it's pretty much the end of our time. In thermal, it's a paranormal disease. I invite you to sit with me, but I may not get up. Homogeneity would be on there. So just to kind of, because the sound is so bad, I'll just explain a little bit that I was really interested in the people that had were brought to Panama to labor in the banana plantations. And a lot of the, a lot of those people were people from Asia, China, Jamaica, the West Indies all over to begin to grow bananas. And I was interested in, in their bodies, you know, being used and this idea of, you know, the body as a kind of, you know, like a resource for united fruit and then sort of the way that their bodies were being affected by the policy that a united fruit was helping to create through U.S. policy, U.S. government policy in the region of Central America's effect to Panama, but also other areas, Costa Rica, Colombia in the region. So to me, this felt like an intersection of mythologies and stories that were intersecting to talk about this history that was very much based on racist ideology formed around manifest destiny and this, you know, this settler mentality. So I'll end now because I feel like I've gone over time. Thank you, Rachael. This is really, really interesting. I think many of the things we have talked about come materialized in your work in so many ways. We wanted to begin this conversation by asking Maria Jose one question and it has to do with the large scale of your pieces. Like, it's hard to see in the presentation and it's hard to see here online, but I was wondering if you can speak a little bit more about the installation, why you decided to protect these images, how does this scale play a very important role in the experience of the spectator of your piece? Yeah, I normally work with objects like I normally do sculptures and installation. I am one of the people that has done installation, like my career is mainly that. I'm very interested in the space and what does the space do with people? Like, how do you behave in different spaces, like if you're in church or, I don't know, you're at your mom's or I don't know, you're in a social event and how these spaces as well, like how to, you know, like influence your behavior. So normally I work. My museographies are like, for me are like another piece of work, like I normally, so for like the, you know, like the experience that the expectation is going to have with the piece is super important for me. And it was really important. I remember I asked for a bigger room and we didn't have it. So for me, it was really important the scale of the piece, especially because it's actually the first time that the piece is shown outside, like, you know, I wouldn't say like a chorus divided in coast highlands and the Masoni. I wouldn't say like people from, you know, like everybody in the coast, I think mainly they have gone to like a farm like a banana farm. But it's these trees are like five, five meters tall, six meters tall. So they're like, so I wanted to kind of have the people to have that kind of sense of how big these trees are and to be like within the space. And it was really, for me, it was a bit kind of how I'm gonna, because, you know, like you go and you do the thingy, you, but the thing is not actually the piece that is there. So how do you put that into a gallery space? And I had a few images and what images were going to work. So I decided to have these two, you know, like, you know, obviously the tree, the image of the tree where you can see it in front of you, but on a scale where people were gonna get a sense of how big this space is because and then you have the other one where you actually see one, you know, like it's almost a dot within just a little bit of a space of these acres of acres of acres of land of these farms, you know, that makes me think about wealth and how this wealth is distributed, unfairly distributed, and all the things that I've already talked about in my presentation. Thank you so much. So I think we're running out of time. So I'm gonna ask Rashel one question and then perhaps we can open it to the public so that the audience here with us today can also enjoy the conversation with the artist themselves. So Rashel, I love your video piece and I'm very curious about the role of gender in the video. I feel like despite perhaps what one would expect about migrant workers being subjective to the way of the company of the UFC on them, they seem to be able to defend themselves like the one who tries to embrace minor kid embraces with him, but it doesn't really happen. And then she says like, I don't want to empathize. What's what like empathize? There's no empathy, basically, like she doesn't want to feel his feelings, right? And then there's the three women who are like dancing and carrying the weight of a burden, but also like, I guess like getting stronger by doing that and by doing it together. So I'd love to hear more about your perspective on gender in this film. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree that there's a way in which I was very I was very interested in the women and particularly because in the research I was doing of the history of taking land, a lot of the victims of the land that was being stolen were women, you know, indigenous women were being killed and and also women as laborers and and the impact of that on their lives. And I think that, you know, when I was working in that piece, I was really thinking about a woman that I actually knew in Panama, who was a woman who had cared for my mother's cousin. And she died just a terrible death. And I won't go into the details of it. But what I mean, when I say terrible death, I mean, just very alone really abandoned. She had spent her whole life caring for others. And at the end of her life, nobody was there for to care for her. And her body was really used in her life. So I was kind of tapping into the spirit of her. And using what I witnessed, you know, because we visited her toward the end of her life in in in her abandonment to portray in the characters of women in the film, I was really interested in that tapping into her biography to talk about, you know, the way that women's bodies get used and they're not being compensated. Yeah. Thank you so much. We can open now these two questions from the public. You can just open your mics or or just write the question on the chat and we can read it. Or Rochelle or Maria Jose. So in the meantime, Maria Jose, can you tell us a little bit about your experience of gold plating a banana plant? How was that? Like, did you bring someone who specialized in these? Like, how did you get the permission to do these? How was where did you get the gold from? Like, can you tell us a little bit more about that process? Well, I'm I'm from the coast. So, but Chala is on the coast of the of Ecuador. And my family are far like from farmers and they have had as well banana plantings themselves. So I have friends, families that owns banana plantings. So I just, you know, like, ask permission to one of them to like, just let me, you know, like, do this piece on his, on his, you know, he was going to lose one plan out of these, you know, acres of acres plants. And then this was actually my first installation that I worked with. Gold plate from then I go live. And then I had a few more pieces that I have worked with that material. We have a region in Ecuador that is called San Antonio de Ibarra, which is normally a traditionally known for carbon wood and gold plating. Is, you know, is something that we got, you know, like indigenous native people got taught colonial times and they after they took kind of over it just kind of became our thing as well. So I just I just went there and I just talked to people. So I just I normally work with collaborations. This is really important in my work because I don't produce my work myself. I collaborated with indigenous native people. And they're, you know, like craft that has kind of powerful identity as well, like gold plating now or wood car as well, like weaving. So I collaborated with this community called that is in San Antonio de Ibarra. And I just, we just moved there and we had to make this bamboo. I forgot the names of the things that you, you know, like a frame. Caffolding, right? Yes, exactly. Like scaffolding around it. And we had to move really quickly because weather in South America are like, you know, when it rains, it just, you know, the rains will be on your waist, you know, like, so we had to move really quickly because of the insects and the weather. And so it was quite challenging, but I'm always up for a challenge. We have here one question from Shayna Rising. She says, hello, and thank you for your terrific presentations. I'm curious, do audiences in the US respond differently to your work than audiences in Latin America? For instance, I am a professor and I teach my students about the history of US intervention in Latin America with the banana industry. And my students are shocked. They were not aware of the banana wars. So do you find that some audiences are more familiar or ready to confront these histories than others? Hi, Shayna. Oh, hi, Shayna. You have a different last name on the chat. So we thought you were somewhere. Shayna is a wonderful scholar and author of an award, a word book on food and art. I'm going to place the link here. I don't know if any of you want to answer. Rochelle? Yeah, sure. I think that it is surprising for, because I've presented this video more to students when I get invited to talk to photography, you know, in classes and students here in the US have absolutely no knowledge of the United States history, its relationship to US best policy in Latin America. There's really no awareness. Whereas when I showed this piece in Panama, I did it with Lara, actually. There is an awareness and there's real interest and there's real understanding in a very different way. So I think that this is why also I'm so interested in, you know, in some ways, you know, so much of my work is based on history and sort of talking and mining the history of US and sort of Central American relations and connectivity. And I guess part of this is my desire that everyone in the US where I live know about it, because I feel like it's part of it. It's our history. It's a collective history. I think they perceive it differently. They obviously, as you mentioned on your comment, they are not aware of things. And, you know, like history itself, when you kind of talk about how they perceive it, I just, you know, I know that right now in the US, there are these conversation arguments about how, you know, your own history is being taught and how like Native Afro-Americans are like saying, we need to say the truth. And, you know, this is the truth. So we have to say it like this. And I do kind of get when I move to, I live all my life in Ecuador. So when I move to the UK, the UK as well is an island. So I just kind of have this idea, my idea, my perception, where when you're on an island, they don't, for example, speak another language in the UK. You know, they all speak English. They all expect everybody to speak English, but they are not aware of, you know, anywhere that happens outside. It's just really, it's crazy. So I'm still in a chat with my friends from Goldsmith, my closest friends, and, you know, I just kind of go like, oh, you know, but, you know, this, this happened, you know, this, this crisis that we have right now in Gels is, is in Al Jazeera. So are you not, you know, you have a friend from Ecuador. So if you should like at least be aware of this, what's happening right now, it affects me. So I do think it's definitely different. As I said, this piece is the first time, I mean, it's not the first time that I exhibit outside, but this piece is the first time that I show it outside. And it was, it was actually quite shocking because the CBA as well has a lot of students that they're there from the States, but the parents are from Mexico or, you know, it was actually for me really shocking to find people from Mexico that her parents, like her parents are, their parents are from Mexico, but they wouldn't speak Spanish or that they are really like not aware of, like they wouldn't, they haven't even been busy, you know, like it's just really painful. So yes, I do have to kind of go into more detail and explain to them because they are not aware. I do kind of know that it's kind of more of a first world thing where, you know, like the history of art is taught within a, you know, European self-center, you know, this is what happened in London, this is what's happened in Paris, but they're not talking about, you know, this is what happened in South America or this is what's happening in Asia. So I just kind of feel like- Thank you, my assistant. Sorry, I think we need to wrap up. I feel like some of our guests are already leaving. I'm going to close with some great remark from Catherine Taft. Thank you so much for your comment on the chat. She says, I have found that while giving tours at the CBA, our audiences have no knowledge at all about the banana industry and the exhibition has opened a lot of opportunities to learn from your work. So thank you so so much and thank you everyone for attending the event today and thank you Cecily for inviting us to create the exhibition and thank you so much Rashel and Maria Jose for being here with us tonight. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you everyone and all the guests.