Ivana de Vivanco recognizes that the simple banana has the capacity to wreak havoc. Ironically, within global trade systems, it already has. A commodity with more than 100 billion consumed annually across the globe, this phallic fruit on the one hand offers affordable nutrition, and on the other has been at the heart of unjust labor practices and further disenfranchisement within “developing” countries. In her United States debut solo exhibition at BREACH gallery in Miami, de Vivanco affords the humble banana a Robin Hood persona, and activates the fruit as a tool for sweet revenge. Titled Splits and Slips, The Disobedient Banana, the exhibition alludes to America’s more superficial relationship with bananas; as a delectable and kinky dessert; as the protagonist causing a slip in Chaplin-esque slapstick comedy; and perhaps even as a duct-taped art edition—but it also suggests a possibility of a split world that is disrupted by slipping preconceived norms. A world where a disobedient banana is an activist.

Born in Portugal, de Vivanco grew up between Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and for the past decade has lived and worked in Germany. Congruently, her creative practice reflects this divergent background amalgamating culturally eclectic references and stylistic approaches, along with conflated logics of time and space. The result is paintings, drawings and sculptures that reflect historical and mythological research, an immersion into the history of painting inspired by her love for Flemish masters spanning the 15th to 17th centuries, as well as a romanticism evocative of Latin American Baroque. Adept at evoking drama, de Vivanco, in addition to these influences, adopts paradigms from literature and theater including children’s puppet shows to construct her visual stories. The picture plane of Everyday Bananas is connoted by a flat rectangle canvas reminiscent of a puppet show stage. The painting is divided between a pink world below encasing three bananas, and a puppet figure with detached head and arms shadowed on a blue backdrop above. As if in motion, the puppet enters the scene with red hands open in exclamation hovering over the bananas below. What would the figure be saying?

‍Anything can happen. The great banana peel of existence is always on the floor somewhere. - Robert Fulgham, Author

Recognizing that it is impossible to represent history accurately, the artist channels her early years of working in graphics and drawing as well as an unparalleled talent for composition, to re-stage history and myth into optimistic fantasy worlds. In Santiago’s Slip, the characteristic depiction of Santiago Matamoros later known as Santiago Mataindios or rather “St. James the Muslim and Indian killer” on his horse is overturned, literally. A woman sits below, and with a simple gesture of discarding a banana peel, effortlessly unseats this fragile ‘conquerer.’ The carnivalesque and colorful figures are fore-fronted as if made to act, by the artist, for onlookers. Reminiscent of the traditional British Punch and Judy puppet show where Mr Punch’s slapstick is instead turned on him, this mise-en-scene offers a vindication and a hopeful retelling of historical ‘truth’ that rights colonial wrongs.

However, despite this orchestrated thematic retelling, de Vivanco also creates a purposeful interpretive distance within her scenes by, in addition to conflating references, she confuses conventional narratives and reduces information to fundamental forms. In the portraits titled José Luis and Ana María, the male figure is inexplicably ‘camp’, and the female beams back with a farcical clown-like smile. Inspired by the aesthetics, costumes, dance and music of Andean carnivals where social norms are inverted within performance, de Vivanco creates characters that evoke the playfulness of the carnival while offering a social critique on gender. Her characters are titled after commonly used Spanish male and female names, and these ‘anyone’ personas are magnified on the canvas to the point of life-size abstraction, yet appear incongruous with our generalized understanding of masculinity and femininity, inviting ideological reinterpretation.

And, this is not the first time de Vivanco has used traditionally non-conforming characters to question gender representation in history. In her exhibition Two Pennies for Myself and Tea at the Spanish Contemporary Art Network in London in 2021, de Vivanco brushed up against entrenched modes of patriarchy by honoring women. Inspired by 17th century English activist “Captain” Ann Carter who led, and was executed for, her role in food protests, de Vivanco created a multimedia exhibition that depicted historical heroines, including a large portrait of Carter, in a language reserved for masculine glorifications. Continuing this dialogue in Miami, a painting of Petrona Yance shows her grasping a spanner with a bowl of bread on her head hiding more tools. Underrepresented for her role, along with 800 women, in smuggling tools to undo train tracks in an attempt to dismantle Colombian state control, de Vivanco shows Yance flanked by female accomplices and with an atypical sly grin that underpins true courage. Sadly, she was discovered and executed for this action in 1928.

De Vivanco’s commitment to (re)represent arduous past events while contradicting preconceived ideas is carried through three new sculptural works, which are composed of ceramic hands and feet detached and suspended from thin gold chains. These chained appendages inarguably reference human brutality and slavery, yet the ceramics is delicate and shiny while the chains are strangely ornamental, recalling the stringed puppet in Everyday Bananas or perhaps the earring worn by José Luis in his portrait. One could argue that de Vivanco has diffused the severity of oppression through playful representation, however her tactic is masterfully intentional. By using color, materiality as well as discursive layering, de Vivanco seduces, and dare we say even manipulates, her onlookers to lower their guard and entice them into a scene which is ultimately violent. However, rather than prescribing a set script, de Vivanco offers enough information to set a scene in which to discover a wider range of narrative possibilities. The result is a juxtapositional push and pull that makes these sculptural installations and paintings deeply uncomfortable, and are perhaps de Vivanco’s most ardent psychological play.

The chain appears again in the diptych The Last Dance both as an enlarged abstracted form floating below and suggested as now broken, and as ornate jewelry on a naked and comically suntanned man. Recalling the monumentality of 18th century epic paintings by Jacques-Luis David depicting dramatic moments often fronted by a masculine hero figure, this large immersive painting is a stage where the central figure is absurd. An Andean woman smiles strangely as she hands him money, while a small masked man dressed in European garb sits on her back appearing helpless. Verging on parody, the conventional representation of these figures is comically, yet also subversively, reversed. Adding further discomfort, the works ‘style’ has a strange playful quaintness as a woman, knowingly smiling at onlookers, drapes a blue cloth behind the scene as if creating a stage curtain that signifies the scene is in fact a reenactment. This self-aware carnivalesque action is countered by an exactitude of colors, figure placement, posture and expression. In fact, the work is so precisely reasoned that de Vivanco simultaneously disrupts colonial storytelling conventions, and makes the futuristic stage play, gone right, believable.

Today, based in Leipzig, a town renowned for its origination of modern German painters, one cannot help draw parallels to the painterly exactitude and constructed narratives of one of the city’s celebrated artists, Neo Rauch. However, the similarity ends at aesthetics as de Vivanco’s playful humor and delicately interwoven thematics depart from Rauch’s looming satire. Instead her latently tense juxtapositions and subtle queering of representations are a subterfuge to themes in her work, which to date have included colonialism, human brutality, gender inequality, and more. De Vivanco’s paintings and sculptures in Splits and Slips disrupt colonial histories proffering hopeful fantasies that re-situate socio-political power systems. Definite in color and composition, the works invite attention while suggesting an alternative narrative that calls for a corrected and more ideal, even utopian space for living. Yet the artist refuses a neat resolve. Rather, de Vivanco provides a space to contemplate many positions and reasons for renewed contextual readings. If the banana is a tool for activism it has also been a witness of centuries of abuse—an abuse that continues today most connectedly to England’s football fields as fans stupidly toss bananas at black players. This only further illustrates that de Vivanco’s contemporary arguments against the inaccurate representation of and repeated violence within history are an ever important and reasoned warning to learn from past mistakes.