Andreina Fuentes Angarita

The work Tremendo cambur, by Venezuelan-born artist Andreina Fuentes Angarita, comprises an installation plus the photographic record of a performance. In the happening, Fuentes Angarita eats bananas from a huge pile of fruit. With sensual gestures, as if she were performing fellatio, the artist wears a white dress symbolizing lost innocence. In the installation, we see an empty white chair with several bunches of bananas at its feet, and photos of the happening hung behind it. Some versions of this work have bananas with stickers showing the face of an ape with a crown of stars and the slogan “bad monkey – no maduro”; in others, the bananas do not have labels, but next to the chair are displayed flyers with the face of Nicolás Maduro crossed out by a forbidden symbol. In both versions, the public is invited to take the bananas (cambures) and the labels. Making a pun with Nicolás Maduro’s surname (president of Venezuela since 2013), the word “maduro” as a synonym for a banana so ripe it is almost rotten, and the popular Venezuelan expression “tremendo cambur” (used when someone receives an important public position in an endogamic and unmeritocratic way), this work is a direct denunciation of the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Because of the political climate and serious institutional crisis in Venezuela, Fuentes Angarita could not produce this work in her country, but in Colombia and the United States, where she has been living since she migrated from Venezuela.