Alexia Benavent-Rivera

In Rana Banana (2025), Alexia Benavent-Rivera condenses the vast history of imperial intervention in Latin America into a deceptively small, jewel-like sculpture. Measuring only a few inches across, the work combines porcelain and beadwork to produce a golden banana from which frogs emerge in abundance. The banana—long a symbol of corporate overreach and the U.S.-backed “Banana Wars” that scarred Central America—here becomes the site of metamorphosis. Rather than a hollow emblem of exploitation, it is transformed into a vessel teeming with life.

Frogs, in Puerto Rican and Panamanian traditions, carry associations of fertility, good fortune, and cyclical renewal. Benavent-Rivera mobilizes this symbolism to propose a counter-history: one in which the land’s richness is not siphoned away by foreign corporations but reclaimed by the people themselves. The swarm of frogs signals both fragility and collective power, an alternative to the isolation and dispossession fostered by monoculture.

Through its playful scale and tactile surfaces, Rana Banana stages a vision of reclamation and agency. It reminds us that the same landscapes exploited as laboratories for empire remain fertile with possibility. In Benavent-Rivera’s hands, the golden banana is reimagined not as a commodity destined for export, but as a seedbed for transformation and a dream of self-determination in the Americas.