Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.
The banana has been used in many forms of art, ranging from paintings to sculpture, and demonstrated its popularity in iconography throughout the years. Why are bananas so popular, both as a fruit and as a modern emoji? One digital exhibit seeks to spread context behind the banana by organizing visual depictions of the fruit through Latin American artworks.
Banana Craze, a bilingual digital research project created by Juanita and Blanca Solano and translated by Banana Link, showcases the dark past and present of the banana industry, and how it has shaped the regions affected by the plantations. The database is available for viewing in both Spanish and English.
Before the globalization of the banana, the fruit itself was hardly eaten outside of its native regions. As the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) established plantations throughout Latin American countries and the Caribbean, bananas became a monoculture industry in itself, now being the number one sold fruit around the world.
The Banana Craze website itself is not only a visual spectacle, but it also features organizational tools so that the viewer can dive deeper into individual artists as well as explore the art on a timeline to provide historical context. For example, the images of this gold leafed banana plant can be found in Mariá José Argerenzio’s entry in the alphabetized index. Maria is an Ecuadorian artist who created the installation to emphasize the extraction of two major resources from Ecuador, bananas and gold, linking Spanish empire colonialism to more modern day practices that exacerbate the region’s environmental health and disparities in wealth.
The viewer can also explore the artworks by other subcategories, such as violences, ecosystems, and country location. Violences is one of the three thematic ways to view the website through the curatorial lenses of the exhibit creators. This framework exercises the function of a digital art exhibit, allowing viewers to explore the history of banana culture with selected artworks.
Building such an interactive online exhibit requires the use of a digital tool that is catered to accessible viewership. The meticulous metadata for each artwork blends seamlessly with each page, allowing me to search and view specific content, while keeping me immersed in the overall project. The multipage exhibits provide context and can function either as a digital archive or art database, depending on how I chose to begin my journey. I appreciated that I can view all the images and documents on the site without downloading any attachments. This provided for a seamless viewing experience.
The exhibit was a visual feast for the eyes. Its contrasting colors are electrifying, almost bordering on jarring, and produces an effective look as I went on to view the art and how they symbolize the practices that have affected the people, the land, and the traditions of Latin America and beyond.
Want to learn more about the history of bananas or protest art? Check out these resources from the UT Libraries:
D’Souza, A., Bright, P., & Lumumba, P. (2018). Whitewalling : art, race & protest in 3 acts. Badlands Unlimited.
Fassio, D., Seuret, F., & Abita, V. (2010). Banana wars: A presentation of Films for the Humanities & Sciences. Films for the Humanities and Sciences.
Koeppel, D. (2008). Banana : The fate of the fruit that changed the world. Hudson Street Press.
Mercurio, G., & Banksy. (2020). A visual protest : the art of Banksy. (English edition.). Prestel.
Portillo Villeda, S. G. (2021). Roots of resistance : A story of gender, race, and labor on the north coast of Honduras. (1st Ed.). University of Texas Press.
This is a fun blog post and a quirky yet incredible important interventional art project. Great work bringing it to everyone’s attention through this post, Tina!