Dodi Espinosa

In Go Bananas!!! (2020), Dodi Espinosa presents a playful yet incisive reflection on mass production, corruption, and cultural hybridity. The installation consists of 44 hand-crafted ceramic sculptures that merge the forms of bananas and baguettes, evoking global trade while doubling as a self-portrait of the artist’s Mexican and Belgian identities. Each piece, painted in vivid yellow and marked with dark stains, embodies what Espinosa calls “the human stain of corruption,” pointing to the entanglement of food economies, speculation, and exploitation.

Exhibited at Trampoline Gallery—temporarily renamed “The Bakery Gallery”—the works were sold as lottery tickets in a tombola, with the possibility of winning a kitsch ceramic cake lamp. This absurdist framework, paired with the pop soundtrack of Garibaldi’s 1989 hit Banana, satirized how symbols of power, trade, and identity are stripped of their political weight and recycled as entertainment or commodity. Through humor and parody, Go Bananas!!! unsettles the very systems of value that govern both the art world and the global banana trade.