Valentina Soto Illanes

In Trópico (Jebe), Valentina Soto Illanes creates six life-size banana leaves made of rubber. The artificial leaves are arranged on the wall; some of them fall on the floor because of the weight and flexibility of the material they are made of. It is precisely the materiality of the work that is striking because, like the banana, rubber attracted foreign interest and provoked the well-known “rubber fever”, a boom in the extraction of this material particularly in the Amazon region between 1879 and 1912, and later in the 1940s. By uniting bananas and rubber in a single piece, the artist draws attention to the different moments of natural resource exploitation experienced in Latin America since the end of the 19th century and throughout much of the 20th century. The new material of these banana leaves also refers to the urban context, contrasting with the image of pristine nature and thus creating a new habitat that, although artificial, comes entirely from nature itself.