Nash Caldera

In Untitled (2021), Nash Caldera once again turns to the plantain as both metaphor and companion, grounding her reflections on Curaçao, South America, and the Caribbean in the plant’s biological and symbolic structure. The artist draws parallels between the corm’s rhizomatic growth—new shoots emerging even after the parent plant has died—and the intertwined histories, identities, and lineages that sustain Caribbean societies. This idea of dispersed yet interconnected roots becomes a framework for thinking about belonging, migration, and the quiet continuities that underlie personal and collective memory.

The videowork unfolds as an intimate letter addressed to the plantain. Caldera speaks to it with tenderness—comforting, reassuring, almost consoling—as she meditates on what it means to fit in, to be from somewhere, or to remain suspended between places. After finishing the letter, she folds the page and tucks it into the hollowed plantain skin alongside red yarn, which becomes the fruit’s visceral interior. She then sews the plantain shut with a red thread, while the word plantain loops in different intonations over the audio. The message is now hidden from view, but the act of sealing it transforms the fruit into a vessel of unspoken longing, a stand-in for bodies and identities that carry histories beneath their surface.

Created during the residency “(Plant-in)-Different-Soil” at VHDG in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, Untitled reflects the artist’s negotiation between her birthplace of Curaçao and the country that once colonized it. The suspended plantain forms—dark, stitched, and partially opened—echo the tensions of cultural inheritance, displacement, and reconstruction. Through this quiet, materially charged ritual, Caldera offers a meditation on care, vulnerability, and the complexity of living between soils, where identity must be continuously mended, carried, and reimagined.