Alexia Benavent-Rivera

Alexia Benavent-Rivera’s Manos de las Madres (2025) confronts the viewer with the dissonance between the marketed beauty of the banana and the hidden labor that sustains its global circulation. Constructed from a striking combination of soft and hard materials—velvet and cotton forming a lush banana blossom and leaves, porcelain castings replicating a “hand” of bananas—the sculpture holds within it a palpable tension. The delicate, textile elements seduce with their tactile richness, evoking the allure of tropical abundance, while the porcelain fruit, heavy and rigid, insists on the industrialized sameness of monoculture crops. Together, these materials stage a clash between seduction and exploitation, fragility and endurance.

The elongated, vertical form of the piece—nearly seven feet high—suggests both the towering presence of the banana plant and the vertical chain of hands that bring the fruit to global supermarket shelves. Benavent-Rivera makes visible the “sister-clone” nature of bananas, genetically identical and endlessly reproduced, while gesturing to the countless, often invisible hands whose labor makes this repetition possible. The red slip woven into the work adds a subtle but haunting reminder of the violence, exhaustion, and dispossession that underpin the fruit’s apparent innocuousness.

In Manos de las Madres, beauty is not an escape from exploitation but a reminder of how easily violence is obscured by the aesthetics of consumption. The work reclaims the banana flower as a site of contradiction: captivating in its ruby red brilliance, yet condemned to die so that another hand of fruit can emerge. Through its rich interplay of materials and forms, the piece reminds us that every banana carries with it a history of labor, exploitation, and resilience that extends far beyond the grocery aisle.