Tonico Lemos Auad

Using pins to prick the banana skin, the Brazilian artist Tonico Lemos Auad creates a series of pieces in which he prints phrases or drawings which refer to voodoo rituals. By pricking the skin of the banana, the artist is tattooing a message on the fruit that he wants to convey. The puncture creates a wound on the skin changing its yellow colour to a dark black that over time reveals the lines added by the artist. This technique refers to rituals such as voodoo, practiced mainly by Afro-descendant communities, many of them forcibly and violently taken to Brazil to work as slaves during colonial times. The piece is materialized in photographs that document the final result of the artist’s process. Therefore, the constructed image is preserved while the fruit continues in its decomposition process. The work of Lemos Auad focuses on the observation of everyday processes that are rarely studied. Hence his interest in objects such as rotting fruits, weaving, and other organic materials that have ritual uses in some communities. In Voodoo Drawing, the artist created drawings of human bones and skulls on the fruit and implanted pins into some of the bananas that allude to those ritual uses.