Claudia Claremi

In Banana Plant (2024) (2023), Claudia Claremi turns her lens toward the quiet resilience of diasporic care, following a Puerto Rican couple in Rochester, New York, who lovingly tend to the banana trees growing in their suburban garden. Filmed on Super-8 and 16mm and later digitized, the work carries the tactile grain of analogue film, reinforcing the sensorial intimacy of the couple’s seasonal ritual. As winter approaches, they uproot the trees—fragile in the northern cold—and bring them indoors, only to return them to the soil each spring. This cyclical choreography of protection becomes a metaphor for the persistence of cultural memory, nurtured year after year against environmental and emotional distance from the Caribbean.

Part of Claremi’s Roots of Support series, the film frames the banana plant as a living anchor for diasporic identity. In the hands of Migdalia and Fernando, the tree is not simply a piece of flora uprooted from its tropical habitat but a conduit to home, family, and the landscapes that shaped their lives. Their gestures reveal an embodied practice of survival and self-definition within displacement: tending the plant becomes a quiet affirmation of belonging that resists erasure. The banana tree, sheltered indoors during harsh winters, mirrors the couple’s own negotiation of climate, geography, and cultural continuity in the diaspora.

Claremi’s approach resists both ethnographic distance and sentimental portraiture. Instead, she positions herself—as she often describes—as a “co-conspirator,” embedding her filmmaking within the everyday rhythms of the communities she films. The series as a whole reflects this ethos: a mango tree flourishing amid gentrification in Puerto Rico (El Hangar), or a woman returning home to cultivate a wildlife garden in the mountains (La Pedrá). In Banana Plant, this sensibility translates into a film that is as much about ecological resilience as it is about human adaptation. The banana tree, oscillating between indoors and outdoors, between tropics and temperate cold, becomes a tender emblem of diasporic endurance and the deeply rooted bonds that sustain life far from home.