La fiebre del banano. Talk with Juanita Solano Roa
Date: Wednesday, August 16, 2023
Time: 6:30 p.m.
Format: In-person
Location: Labs 1 and 2
Free admission
Since the mid-20th century, numerous artists from Latin America and the Caribbean have reflected on the ubiquity of the banana in the global diet and investigated the history of exploitation suffered by their nations as a consequence of the internationalization of the banana market from the late 19th century to the present. Banana plantations are, therefore, a place from which it is possible to reflect on the sociopolitical reality of Latin America, and that is why the representation of the banana in Latin American visual arts brings together practices that are so diverse.
Despite the differences between the contexts and moments to which the works refer, they also reveal the common legacy shared by their artists. Indeed, from the relationship between the banana and climate change, through the impact of banana trade by foreign companies on the social inequality of farming communities, to the similarity between the journey made by many Latin American migrants to so-called first-world countries and the transportation of bananas from the countries where they are cultivated to the places where they are consumed, large-scale banana commercialization touches fundamental axes of development in producing countries since the beginning of the 20th century.
In this talk, an introduction to the history of the banana in Latin America will be given through the analysis of a series of artworks that critically reflect on the impact of this monoculture on the culture, economy, and environment of the region. The selection of works, as well as the research for this talk, is the result of the digital humanities project Banana Craze/La fiebre del banano.
About Juanita Solano Roa
She is an assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the Universidad de los Andes. She holds a doctorate in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts (NYU) and a master’s degree from the same institution. Her work focuses on research into the history of photography, the relationship between art and food, and the history of modern and contemporary art in Latin America.
In 2022, she received the award for best article on Latin American art from the Association for Latin American Art (ALAA), and in 2015, she received the Joan and Stanford Alexander Award. Among her most recent publications are Historias del arte en Colombia. Identidades, migraciones, materialidades y geografias (Ediciones Uniandes, 2022), “Fotoramas: Jorge Obando y la fotografia panoramica de los anos treinta en Colombia” (Historia y Sociedad, 2022), and “Melodrama’s Fictional System: Fernell Franco’s Photography and The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema” (History of Photography, 2021). Solano Roa is also co-curator of the digital humanities project La fiebre del banano/Banana Craze (https://bananacraze.uniandes.edu.co/).