Daniel Bernal

In Patria (2025), Daniel Bernal constructs a suspended network of tubes and cables converging around a central banana spine, through which a red fluid circulates. The sculpture evokes both a circulatory system and an industrial infrastructure—alive yet mechanized. The pulsing red liquid suggests blood, tying the vitality of human labor to the invisible machinery of production. The title, Patria (Homeland), introduces an ironic tension: the nation as both body and machine, nourished and drained by the same colonial and capitalist legacies that once shaped its birth.

Bernal’s metaphor extends through the Spanish proverb “Árbol que crece torcido jamás su tronco endereza” (“a tree that grows crooked never straightens its trunk”). His skeletal tree refuses natural order; its roots ascend, its veins dangle, and its fruit—bananas turned dark and heavy—hang like reminders of an inherited deformation. In this inverted ecosystem, patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism intertwine, feeding one another in cycles of extraction and control. The unseen source of the flowing red substance underscores the opacity of power: the hidden systems that sustain inequality while remaining out of sight.

Yet Patria also gestures toward the possibility of reconfiguration. Its distorted anatomy invites viewers to imagine new circulations, new ways of growing differently. By transforming the banana—once a symbol of exploitation—into the backbone of an uncanny organism, Bernal visualizes both the persistence and the potential undoing of systemic corruption. The work becomes a speculative ecology, where the artist re-engineers the inherited structures of nationhood, asking whether a crooked trunk might yet sustain a different kind of life.