Alejandro Osses

Created at Corabastos, Bogotá’s wholesale food market, Proyecto B11 (2018) documents the spaces, infrastructures, and workers that sustain one of Colombia’s principal banana and plantain distribution networks. Across five photographs — LA B11, Cotero, 068, 20 años entre el plátano, and 5:20 AM — Alejandro Osses focuses on the logistical systems that enable plantains to move daily from producing regions to urban markets. The images depict warehouses densely packed with fruit wrapped in plastic, narrow corridors crowded with merchandise, and workers whose labor supports the circulation of one of the country’s most widely consumed foods.

Rather than approaching the plantain as a tropical icon or cultural symbol, the series presents it as commodity, infrastructure, and livelihood. Osses photographs the fruit at different stages of its commercial trajectory: stored in vast quantities, carried by loaders, negotiated by traders, and subjected to speculative pricing mechanisms. The photographs foreground the material scale of a food economy in which the plantain connects rural production zones, wholesale markets, and urban consumption. By concentrating on spaces of exchange and on the individuals who spend their lives working among tons of fruit, the series reveals the labor relations, inequalities, and power structures that remain largely invisible behind the everyday presence of one of Colombia’s staple foods.