Nicolás Consuegra

Nicolás Consuegra’s Cathedral (After Oscar Niemeyer) (2017) transforms one of Latin America’s most iconic modernist structures into an allegory of faith and exploitation. The circular sculpture, made of cement, arranges sixteen white bananas in an upward crown-like formation, mirroring the sixteen concrete pillars of Brasília’s Metropolitan Cathedral designed by Oscar Niemeyer. By replacing the soaring ribs of modern architecture with the curved forms of bananas, Consuegra collapses the spiritual and the material, forcing a meditation on the foundations of belief—religious, political, and economic—that have shaped the modern Latin American state.

The work’s austere palette and industrial material evoke the utopian aesthetics of modernism, yet the substitution of bananas for columns exposes the fragility of that ideal. The banana, a recurring motif in Consuegra’s practice, becomes here a symbol of both sustenance and subjugation—a reminder that the promises of progress and prosperity were often built upon extractive economies. The smooth cement surface freezes the organic fruit into permanence, memorializing a system in which the exploitation of land and labor has been institutionalized and aestheticized. The sculpture’s geometry suggests a reliquary of power, its symmetry concealing the violence required to sustain it.

Through Cathedral, Consuegra proposes a “logical parable”: if Niemeyer’s cathedral once embodied the faith of modernity, then the banana cathedral reveals the faith modernity itself placed in exploitation. The piece reimagines the architecture of belief, substituting divine transcendence with economic dependency. In the silent ring of stone-like bananas, Consuegra offers a haunting synthesis—where modernism’s idealism meets the reality of colonial legacy, and where the banana, emblem of both paradise and plunder, becomes the true pillar of a continent’s uneasy faith.