Valentina Velázquez de León

In Quiero que el amor romántico deje de penetrarme (2024), Valentina Velázquez de León transforms the banana into a charged symbol through which intimacy, violence, and feminist resistance converge. Developed from a phrase the artist had carried with her for years, the work emerged as a video performance in which bananas are crushed, stabbed, peeled apart, and destroyed using ordinary domestic tools—knives, potato mashers, and the artist’s own hands. Rather than reproducing the familiar eroticization of fruit within art history and popular culture, Velázquez de León inverts it. The banana, chosen for its tactile and conceptual associations as a phallic object, becomes the site of refusal: an object not of consumption or desire, but of confrontation.

The work draws subtle connections to feminist protest culture in Mexico, particularly slogans such as “machete al machote” and “verga violadora a la licuadora,” in which the symbolic destruction of masculinity operates as both catharsis and political critique. Yet the performance resists spectacle or rigid scripting. Velázquez de León allowed the gestures and rhythms of the action to unfold organically, constructing meaning through repetition, texture, and physical contact. The banana’s particular material qualities—its softness beneath the peel, the necessity of touching and opening it before consumption—become central to the piece’s emotional register. Through acts of crushing and rupture, the artist redirects the fruit’s conventional symbolism toward vulnerability, exhaustion, and self-protection.

Accompanying the video performance is a small publication conceived as an extension of the project rather than merely its documentation. Interested in forms of circulation not governed by algorithms, Velázquez de León imagined the printed object as something passed hand to hand, capable of functioning independently from the video itself. The publication includes a final image absent from the performance: a table covered with flattened bananas, transformed from recognizable fruit into traces of accumulated action. In this gesture, the work expands beyond the temporal limits of performance into a reproducible and intimate form of distribution, foregrounding touch, exchange, and collective recognition.