Martín Wannám

Martín Wannám’s Blood Bananas (2022) transforms a familiar symbol of tropical abundance into a vessel of mourning and defiance. A red wheelbarrow—an object of daily labor and survival—overflows with dozens of wax-cast bananas in varying shades of crimson, each marked by the faint imprint of a crucifix. The composition evokes both an altar and a crime scene: the wax suggesting coagulated blood, the cross signaling faith weaponized. At once tender and violent, the piece locates the banana—Guatemala’s most emblematic export—at the intersection of imperial exploitation and the persecution of queer bodies.

In Blood Bananas, the fruit becomes a double metaphor: for the blood spilled in the name of progress and for the resilience of communities that persist despite it. The use of candle wax, a material tied to both ritual and remembrance, infuses the installation with devotional undertones. As the wax softens under light or heat, it recalls the vulnerability of flesh and the precariousness of life lived under systems of domination—religious, economic, and social. The banana leaf lining the wheelbarrow nods to agricultural labor, grounding the work in the textures and gestures of Guatemalan street life while insisting that the sacred and the everyday are inseparable.

Wannám’s intervention collapses distance between colonial histories and contemporary violence. By loading the wheelbarrow with bleeding fruit, he exposes how the rhetoric of faith and the mechanisms of empire have long collaborated to extract, discipline, and erase. Yet the piece also refuses despair: its vivid reds and tactile materiality speak of love as much as loss, of survival as a form of resistance. In Blood Bananas, the fruit of empire is reclaimed as a queer offering—fragile, luminous, and defiantly alive.