Estefanía Parra

In A los cuerpos devanados por el tiempo (2025), Estefanía Parra transforms banana fiber into a vulnerable body subjected to processes of tension, extraction, and erosion. The installation stages an encounter between organic matter and rudimentary industrial mechanisms: strands of banana fiber are suspended, combed, stretched, and shed across metallic structures that evoke incomplete agricultural machines or exhausted tools of production. Through this choreography of friction, the work foregrounds the violence implicit in transforming living matter into usable material.

At the center of the piece lies the act of combing the fiber — a process necessary to render it workable and threadable, yet one that simultaneously frays, weakens, and partially destroys it. The banana fiber begins to resemble hair, muscle, tendon, or skin, acquiring an unsettling corporeal presence. Parra collapses distinctions between vegetal, human, and mechanical bodies, suggesting that all systems of production depend upon forms of wear, resistance, and eventual collapse. The machine itself appears unstable and contingent, incapable of sustaining continuous movement without failure or interruption.

Rather than approaching the banana through its familiar iconographies, A los cuerpos devanados por el tiempo shifts attention toward the hidden material infrastructures underlying agricultural economies. Here, the banana emerges not as fruit or symbol, but as processed residue: a fibrous body subjected to labor, discipline, and transformation. In doing so, the work expands Banana Craze’s interest in extraction and circulation toward questions of biomaterials, industrial fragility, and the invisible violences embedded within systems of production.