Jackie Amezquita

Jackie Amézquita’s El Sudor de Mi Gente (2023) transforms the slow decay of bananas into a material record of labor, migration, and extraction. Created by incubating bananas directly onto copper panels for nine months, the work harnesses decomposition as both method and metaphor. As the fruit rots, it etches itself into the metal, producing blue-green patinas that resemble oxidized landscapes and bodily traces. According to the artist, these marks emerge entirely from the chemical and organic processes at play, introducing an element of chance that is central to the work’s meaning.

The resulting triptych evokes the historic entanglement between plantation economies and the people of Central and South America, for whom bananas have long been tied to colonial labor systems and uneven geographies of profit. The copper plates—held together in a contained environment during incubation—allow insects, moisture, and material to circulate across surfaces. Amézquita relates this cross-pollination to the movement of people across the Americas, suggesting that migratory flows leave behind visible and invisible residues: “traces of labor, life, and death.” In this sense, the work becomes a quiet cartography of displacement, mapping how bodies and environments absorb the pressures of extraction over time.

El Sudor de Mi Gente also extends Amézquita’s broader practice grounded in Indigenous Mesoamerican cosmology and the ritual transformation of earth-based materials. Throughout Nuestro Norte Siempre a Sido el Sur, she reimagines fissures, erosion, and deterioration as generative forces—sites where histories can be re-inscribed and futures re-imagined. Within this context, the banana’s oxidation pattern reads not only as evidence of decay but also as a gesture toward regeneration: a reminder that, even within systems of exploitation, new forms of relation, memory, and resistance continue to take shape.