Nash Caldera

In I’m a Plantain not a Banana, Nash Caldera turns the plantain into a poetic anchor from which to consider the historical, linguistic, and affective interconnections linking Curaçao, South America, and the Caribbean. The artist draws on the very structure of the plant—the corm that continues to generate new shoots even after the original trunk has died—as a metaphor for continuity, community, and shared memory. This botanical analogy offers both a visual and conceptual framework for understanding how the region’s societies sustain themselves through multigenerational, hybrid, and resilient networks in which what disappears still nourishes what emerges.

The video interweaves animation, collage, and an enveloping soundscape that invites viewers into an emotional space rather than an analytical one. In its first half, Caldera juxtaposes text flashing “I’m a plantain not a banana” with a spinning plantain-duo, snippets of the Chiquita Banana Song, and the word plantain pronounced in Papiamentu, English, Spanish, and Dutch. This constellation of images and sounds evokes the circulation of bodies, languages, and cultural symbols shaped by Curaçao’s colonial and migratory histories. A reflective poem adds personal recollections and intimate associations, reinforcing the plantain’s role as a sensorial archive of belonging, displacement, and transformation.

In the second half of the videowork, the viewer witnesses two common methods of preparing plantain across the Caribbean and Latin America. This shift toward a domestic and embodied gesture grounds the work in lived cultural practice, underscoring the fruit’s centrality as a connector of territory, memory, and everyday sustenance. Created during the residency “(Plant-in)-Different-Soil” at VHDG in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, the piece also reflects on Caldera’s own experience between Curaçao and the former colonial metropole. The plantain becomes a narrative device through which to explore migration, inheritance, and the complexities of identity, offering a tender yet incisive meditation on what it means to root oneself in different soils.