Banana – a story of evolution, by Vlad Dobrițan

Banana, the edible fruit produced by musa sapientum, part of the Musaceae family, might be our national symbol of emancipation.

This is the main statement of a project of mine and Mihai Mesaroș's , called “Banana – a story of evolution”. This statement might sound radical, but considering the fact that the first European to eat the fruit of musa sapientum was probably Alexander the Great when he reached India, and the fact that bananas were introduced on Europe’s markets as early as 1800 BC might change your mind.

You might ask what does this have to do with Romania?

You have to consider that  bananas were not accessible to the mass population in Romania until the fall of  Ceaușescu’s regime which collapsed after he ordered his security forces to fire on anti-government demonstrators in the city of Timișoara on 17 December 1989 – after the demonstrations spread to Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, and other major cities and became known as the Romanian Revolution, which was the only violent removal of a Communist government in the course of the revolutions of 1989. If you think about that, now you see how bananas, emancipation and Romania starts to make sense.

Hearing stories about how people used to get bananas from relatives from the Federal Republic of Germany, bananas that were still green, that were left on the wardrobe to ripen, and how easily it is for us nowadays to buy some bananas and how we consider it normality it’s not too far away from how the cavemen used to make fire with stones comparing to our modern heating systems. That’s why we, in our project, see the banana as a national symbol of emancipation.

Emancipation – evolution of banana, of man, of our nation and culture, all these lay beneath our ongoing series of works inspired and based on banana as a symbol.

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