Sometimes, the Heart Yearns for Bananas is an exhibition and series of community-led workshops by the collective Soil of Cultures that seeks to raise awareness about the phenomenon of forced migration across the Global South. Through a range of practices including cooking, printmaking, installation and community organising, the collective highlights how migrant and climate struggles coincide with ecological changes, changes that are synonymous with their migration to Aotearoa.
At the centre of the exhibition is a banana tree raft used to navigate rivers and rising floodwaters across tropical regions. A pair of workshops invite participants to create their own rafts and to share and cook migrant recipes using a variety of ingredients. Using connections to food via introduced cultural crops, memories and collectively held knowledge, Soil of Cultures point to wider issues around the root causes of forced migration and suggest how local adaptations continually reconfigure migrant identities and survival.
The title of the exhibition pays tribute to the poem, Sometimes, the Heart Yearns for Mangoes, written by the exiled Filipino poet, writer and revolutionary José María Sison. Sison’s poem embodies a yearning for the comforts of the motherland by migrant communities from neocolonial nations. Soil of Cultures draws on the poem’s longing for familiar foods and declaration of resistance from afar to explore opportunities for collective action. Sometimes, the Heart Yearns for Bananas asserts how migrant, refugee and labour struggles are deeply bound to the legacies of colonialism and imperialism and reveals the experiences of displacement and disconnection of those impacted by geopolitical and socio-economic crises.
→ Opening event
About the artists
Soil of Cultures is a collective of artists, cultural workers, and community organisers advocating for people’s food sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally. Their mission is to empower communities to reclaim control over their food systems through collective action, storytelling, and art. The collective is made up of Charles and Grace Buenconsejo, Auggie Fontanilla, and Janica Bayogan.