Daniel Bernal

In Sperm over History (2025), Daniel Bernal stages a subversive meditation on how knowledge is produced, recorded, and sanctified. Suspended above an open book, wax bananas drip onto its pages, their slow secretion obscuring words like Common Sense and Common Wealth. The scene evokes a quiet yet irreverent ritual—an act of unlearning in which the canonical text, symbol of Western rationality, is both desecrated and renewed. By replacing ink with melted wax, Bernal refuses to contribute another written treatise to the archive of patriarchal authority; instead, he lets matter itself—viscous, bodily, uncontrolled—speak back to history.

The banana, long a charged emblem of colonial trade and racialized desire, becomes here a parody of male intellect. Bernal transforms its phallic form into a self-consuming candle, its substance expended not in enlightenment but in decay. The dripping wax suggests both ejaculation and erasure, echoing the artist’s own ambivalence toward the knowledge systems he has inherited. In this alchemical gesture, learning is no longer about illumination but about melting down the rigid scaffolds of what has been deemed “universal truth.”

At once humorous and unsettling, Sperm over History exposes the fragility of institutions that claim to preserve knowledge while erasing other epistemologies. Bernal’s installation invites viewers to dwell in the ambiguity between reverence and ridicule—to question who writes history, with whose body, and at whose expense. The work does not propose a new doctrine but gestures toward a more fluid, sensorial understanding of knowing—one that acknowledges desire, mess, and doubt as integral to thought itself.