Minia Biabiany

In The Sky with Rooted Eyes (2025), the banana flower emerges as a key symbolic axis through which Biabiany articulates the entanglement of ecology, history, and cosmology in Guadeloupe. Suspended between sky and soil, the installation constructs a speculative constellation in which ceramic frog-sculptures—traced from nocturnal observation—are mirrored in water-filled calabashes, collapsing distinctions between reflection and presence, above and below. Within this system, the banana flower operates as a charged emblem: at once botanical form and historical marker, it condenses the island’s layered realities into a single, recurring motif.

The flower’s ambivalence is central. It simultaneously evokes the toxic legacy of chlordecone contamination—one of the most enduring ecological and social crises tied to banana monoculture in the French Caribbean—and the plant’s medicinal and regenerative properties. In this dual capacity, the banana becomes a site of contradiction and potential, embodying both harm and healing. Biabiany’s installation thus repositions the fruit beyond its status as commodity, situating it within a broader epistemology where land, memory, and body are interwoven. Through this lens, the banana flower is not merely represented but activated as a living archive—one that insists on the persistence of colonial histories while gesturing toward forms of repair grounded in the rhythms of the earth.