Gonzalo Fuenmayor

In Los encantos de la violencia (2013) (“The Charms of Violence”), Gonzalo Fuenmayor stages surreal and unsettling interventions within the landscapes of the banana plantation. Across the series, human figures merge with bunches of bananas, tropical vegetation, and tools associated with agricultural labor, creating hybrid bodies suspended between absurdity and menace. In the image shown here, a shirtless worker stands on a dirt road flanked by endless banana fields, his head replaced by an oversized cluster of green bananas while he raises a machete in mid-gesture. The scene oscillates between humor and threat, theatricality and brutality, exposing the tensions hidden beneath the idyllic imagery historically associated with tropical abundance.

The banana plantation appears not as a neutral agricultural site, but as a charged political landscape shaped by histories of extraction, monoculture, and violence in the Caribbean and Latin America. By transforming the banana into a grotesque extension of the human body, Fuenmayor points to the ways in which laborers have historically been reduced to anonymous components within global systems of production. The machete — both agricultural tool and symbol of resistance or aggression — intensifies this ambiguity, suggesting how violence permeates not only the physical conditions of plantation economies but also the cultural fantasies built around them. Through exaggeration, irony, and visual spectacle, the series confronts the seductive imagery of the tropics while revealing the instability and unease that lie beneath it.