Leandro Nerefu

Uma Breve Historia da Historia Banana na Arte da is an artist’s book compiling an assortment of visual sources—from art history to popular art—to tell through a single fruit, the banana, the history of Latin America during the 20th century. Using the aesthetics of what Hyto Steyrel has called “the poor image”, that is, low-quality, low-resolution images that have been cropped, pasted, and deteriorated due to their high circulation in digital format, Leandro Nerefu constructs a visual and textual narrative of more than a hundred pages. The book is organized thematically in chapters such as “The Banana in Equestrian Portraiture”, “Cannibalism”, and “The Banana in the Tight-Legged Comedy of American Cinema”. Using humor, pedagogy, and extensive research, Nerefu constructs—in the manner of short history books—the history of this infamous fruit with special emphasis on the American context.