Carlos Martiel

In Jungle (2024), Cuban artist Carlos Martiel stages his own body as both offering and accusation. Lying naked on a long table surrounded by tropical fruits imported from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, he transforms an image of abundance into one of exhaustion. Viewers are invited to eat the fruit—bananas, pineapples, mangoes—until nothing remains, enacting a metaphor of consumption that extends beyond food to the histories of Black labor, sexuality, and cultural appropriation.

The banana, in particular, anchors the work’s provocation. Long burdened with colonial and erotic connotations, it functions here as both phallic symbol and racial signifier—an object through which the Black male body has been simultaneously exoticized, feared, and desired. By placing his own naked body among the fruit, Martiel turns that symbolism back onto the spectators, forcing them to confront the colonial and sexual economies that continue to shape how Blackness is seen and consumed.

Set against the polished backdrop of Fire Island Pines—a space emblematic of white queer privilege and leisure—Jungleheightens the tension between visibility and objectification. The performance’s elegance and discomfort coexist: an image of tropical excess that unravels into a critique of fetishization. In Martiel’s work, the banana becomes not just a fruit but a cipher—of empire, eros, and endurance—challenging the audience to recognize the appetite that sustains both racism and desire.