Rupture and Recollect: Claudia Claremi’s ‘La memoria de las frutas’
Claudia Claremi, ‘La memoria de las frutas,’ Puerto Rico, film, photo courtesy of Claudia Claremi.
A simple prompt is at the center of Claudia Claremi’s La memoria de las frutas: Recall a memory with a rare fruit. While living in Cuba, Claremi visited Puerto Rico in 2015 for La Practica, Beta Local’s artist residency program. She expected a greater availability of fruits compared to Cuba, where the monocultural production of sugar forms the base of local agriculture. However, the lack of fruits available in Puerto Rican supermarkets surprised her. Claremi’s ongoing project, which now has chapters in the Dominican Republic and Cuba and also features members of the Caribbean diaspora in New York and Madrid, is an interrogation of how food infrastructures make themselves felt.
Preparing to write about Claremi’s work, I took inventory of the fruits available in my local supermarket in Puerto Rico. These included: bananas and papaya (both produced locally); three varieties of apple, which included red and golden delicious packed in bags and imported from the U.S.; oranges (also a U.S. import); pears (from Italy), kiwi (from Chile); mangoes (from Costa Rica), and, to my surprise and delight, tucked away in the rightmost corner of one of the gondolas, mamey sapote.
Compare this list to the number of fruits listed in Puerto Rican singer-songwriter MIMA’s lamentation of the disappearance of local harvests:
Chirimoya y pomarrosa
granada, cidra, pajuil
pitahaya, durio, lechosa
jaca, corazón, aprín.
Lerenes, cacao y anón
icaco, murta y pitanga
guamá, fruta milagrosa
grosellas, tagua y limón.
China, toronja, chironja
naranja, caña, mangó
parcha, piña, coco, pana
acerolas, cundeamor.
Jobo, guayaba, jobillo
guanábana, almendra y jagua
guineos manzanos o niños
plátanos y tamarindos.
Jácama, maya, canela
maricao, níspero, mamey
quenepa, tuna, laurel
alcanfor, uva playera.
Algarroba, aguacate, higüera
mangostán y sebucón
rambután y moralón
carambola o fruta estrella
Highlighting this loss is one of the reasons Claremi never directly shows us the fruits in her work. Instead, participants speak of fruits and gesture to them. At the center of her project, which also includes written and oral accounts, is 16mm black-and-white, hand-processed film footage of empty hands moving slowly as they trace the outlines of a remembered fruit. The results are often movingly tender as participants cradle their imagined fruit in the palms of their hands, delineating their shapes slowly.
At times, they draw the fruits so carefully that they almost summon them. In other moments, their uncertainty is palatable as they oscillate, drawing contours that are wobbly and imprecise. The title of the project, Las memoria de las frutas, also draws uneasy frameworks, purposely leaving the viewer in ambiguity about whose memory they are witnessing: the person or the fruit. Memory in this work is our only point of access to fruits. Conversely, fruits are containers of memory. This entanglement is a call to find ways of referencing fruit that go beyond the limited parameters of produce—that is, product.
Describing her work as an archive on La Casa Encedida Radio, La memoria de las frutas is intentionally a gathering of partial accounts. There, in Claremi’s reference to the archive, is an inherent tension: How does one create an archive of fruits and memories, both alive and subject to natural cycles? Conveying a relationship to fruits that goes beyond the limiting language of product includes finding ways of sharing stories that are aware of the narrow relationship among archiving, cataloging, and possessing. Claremi’s project, in this context, not only offers recollections but ways of documenting that challenge expectations of continual availability.
Registering the uneasy dynamic between local harvest and global trade, the accounts that comprise Claremi’s project foreground a forgetting brought about by systemic factors. “I was born in Santa Clara, but at 3, I moved to Havana,” one participant shares. “My knowledge of fruits stopped at mango, guava, and pineapple. The connection between trees and fruits didn’t exist for me. And before I never would have imagined that fruits could also be flowers.”
Nací en Santa Clara, pero a los tres años me mudé a la Habana. O sea, mi conocimiento de frutas era: mango, guayaba y piña y se acabó. La relación árbol fruta no existía en mi cabeza. ¡Y jamás pensar que la fruta antes era una flor!
Another says, “My cousins, who were born and grew up in New York, came for a funeral and I was taking them around and said, ‘Let’s get some coconuts.’ A fruit vendor prepared one and my cousins said, ‘That’s a coconut?’ Coconuts are round. But since they buy them already prepared, they had never seen unripe green coconuts.”
Unos primos que nacieron y se criaron en Nueva York vinieron para el entierro de un tío mío y yo les estaba dando una vuelta y les digo: “Vamos por un coco. Y entonces, nos pelan uno y me dicen: ¿Pero eso es coco? Si el coco viene así redondito. Y es que, como los venden ya mondados, nunca los habían visto verdes.
These stories also point to the negative impacts of U.S. policy and infrastructure on local agriculture. “I am not going to pay $7 for guanábana, ni pal carajo, especially since they grow wherever you plant them,” one person says. “The fruits in the country are expensive. I don’t know if it’s because there’s a shortage. I have no idea. When grocery stores started to sell produce from the United States, people started to favor those fruits. They thought they were more nutritious. Our fruits became undervalued as a result.”
Yo no doy siete dólares por una guanábana ni pal carajo! Además, que si la siembras donde quiera se dan. Realmente las frutas del país son caras. Yo no sé si es que no las hay. ¡No sé! Cuando los supermercados comenzaron a vender todo lo que venía de Estados Unidos, la gente comenzó a darle más importancia a esas frutas. Incluso se creía que ésas alimentaban más. Entonces, la fruta del país se fue menospreciando.”
As with the rest of the Caribbean, the extraction and violence of the plantation economy underpin Puerto Rico’s agricultural history. While monocultural production of sugar formed the base of the Puerto Rican economy at the beginning of the 20th century, 65% of the food that people consumed on the island still came from local producers until the 1930s. Operation Bootstrap continued to weaken Puerto Rico’s agricultural economy through a series of projects including the Industrial Incentives Act of 1947, which encouraged U.S. manufacturing companies to establish factories on the island by waiving corporate taxes. Presently, the island imports 80% of consumed food, and the Jones Act—a 1920s policy that requires all maritime transport of cargo between the U.S. mainland and its territories be U.S.-owned, staffed, registered, and built—has resulted in consistently higher costs for everyday food items.
The testimonies in Claremi’s work challenge associations with global trade. Members of the Caribbean diaspora in Madrid and New York reveal that while certain fruits are available year-round, the taste is lost in the process. “Some fruits are waxed so they last longer,” one person says. “They gain a kind of beauty on the outside, but, at the same time, they lack life and almost appear like plastic. In Cuba, they have that ugliness because they rot quickly due to the hot climate.”
Hay algunas que están encerradas para que duren más. Aquí las frutas adquieren como una belleza por fuera, pero, por otra parte, tienen esa carencia de vida que parecen plásticas. En Cuba tienen esa fealdad de que se pudren enseguida por el calor del clima.
Industrialized agriculture haunts Claremi’s accounts. The references to the ubiquity of aesthetically beautiful and standardized, seedless fruits point to the prominence of genetically modified crops in global foodways as a by-product of American multinational corporations' strides for greater profit. Blanca Serrano and Juanita Solano’s curatorial project Banana Craze is an ongoing investigation into how the banana surfaces thematically in contemporary Latin American art. Interested in how multinational corporations, most infamously the United Fruit Company (now known as Chiquita banana), came to create and control a market of tropical fruit, Serrano and Solano trace how the banana shaped “identities, ecosystems, and violence in Latin America.”
Leveraging its economic influence on politics, those at the helm of The United Fruit Company overthrew democratically elected leaders in Central America in favor of dictators aligned with U.S. capitalist interests, establishing “banana republics.” The scale of the United Fruit Company’s project not only dominated the global supply chain, leading to fewer commercial varieties but also defined what a banana should look and taste like. First, with Gros Michel banana, which went virtually extinct in the 1950s from a fungus called Panama disease, and currently with the banana most readily available in supermarkets; the Cavendish banana comprises 99% of exported bananas and 47% of bananas harvested despite the hundreds of varieties of banana that exist in the Caribbean alone. The genetically homogenous Cavendish, like the Gros Michel, is highly susceptible to disease leading some to believe that, because of the rampant use of pesticides in its cultivation, it will similarly become extinct.
Producing genetically identical crops results in what scholar and activist Vandana Shiva calls “monocultures of the mind." Noting that both in agriculture and in the production of knowledge, monocultures posit a lack of plurality that is not just a method of harvesting but an epistemic violence that asserts a worldview that prioritizes routinization, uniformity, and exact reproducibility.
Claudia Claremi, Un Piano Preparado, La memoria de las frutas (España), 2023, photo courtesy of Claudia Claremi.
Film, if we extend the metaphor, also promises exact reproducibility appearing to create a 1:1 register of what it records. In 1925, the United States Department of Agriculture led a series of expeditions to Ceylon, Sumatra, and Java to find plants to introduce to the American market. These trips were the subject of a silent film ethnographically documenting the local landscape and people intervening with informative slides providing narration. Aware of the power of documentary images, The United Fruit Company’s expansive photographic archive showcased its building of mass infrastructure in Central and South America as a way of shaping public opinion, arguing for the benefits they were bringing to the region through processes of modernization. Before color photography was readily available, the USDA commissioned artists to create 7,584 scientifically accurate illustrations of the fruits that formed part of and were being introduced to the American market in An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts. The visual exposition of fruits in archives of documentary material is part of a legacy of the Global North's extraction from the Global South.
Claremi’s use of analog film, 16mm specifically, that she hand develops is distinct in that it breaks the visual conventions of cataloging and allows for randomness and chance to intervene. As one frame moves to another, interference surfaces in the form of white flecks. These move quickly throughout the image giving a sense that at any given point the film itself could evaporate. With the power inherent in the act of indexing, cataloging, preserving, and the inherent oversights that come with the selective act of documenting, the inconsistencies in the analog film spotlight the limitations of the medium, calling attention to its failure in creating a complete record.
Structuring her installations to stagger information, Claremi continues to work against a drive to amass in a way that is totalizing. Separating footage from the accompanying testimony in text, there is an element of guesswork involved in the act of viewing, whether it’s piecing together footage with its accompanying account or recognizing the corporeal experience of the fruit solely through gestures and being able to identify it.
“This conscious denial of images of tropical fruits intervenes in a long legacy of exotifying imagery.”
This conscious denial of images of tropical fruits intervenes in a long legacy of exotifying imagery. Shana Klein’s book Fruits of Empire notes that visual culture and art played a role in crafting an imaginary of tropical fruits in the U.S. market as markers of class and status. The Dole Company marketed the pineapples it imported in the 1920s through cartoonish images of Indigenous families enjoying fruit. In the 1980s, Chiquita launched a highly successful advertising campaign featuring a now-humanized Miss Chiquita mascot, the Carmen Miranda-esque character. With an abundance of case studies, Claremi's choice to not show fruits works against a continually reinforced tendency to consume tropical fruits visually.
Equally central to La memoria de las frutas are the moments of unexpected encounters, the loving recounting of fruits gathered from grandmother’s gardens and neighbor’s yards that take place on a hyper-local scale: “Recently, I bought a corazón in Río Piedras,” one participant says. “I hadn’t eaten corazón since childhood. There was un palo en Lajas, where my grandfather lived, and he collected them.”
Recientemente me compré en Río Piedras un corazón. ¡No comía corazón desde que era un niño! Había un palo en Lajas, donde vivía mi abuelo, y él los cogía.
“There’s a jobillo en Guaynabo, a section between two residential areas,” another person says. “There’s a tree that must be 200 years old, and every summer, there are so many fruits on it and the floor. But it’s difficult to stop and pick them up because cars might hit you.”
Yo sé que hay un jobillo en Guaynabo, en un tramo entre dos urbanizaciones. ¡Es un árbol que debe tener 200 años! y todos los veranos tú lo ves cargado de frutos y el piso también… y es difícil porque no puedes parar y recogerlos porque ¡te pueden chocar el carro!
One of the anecdotes in Claremi’s project that stays with me details the memories of tagua tagua, a vine fruit that is adjacent to passion fruit but without the acidity. Since farmers cannot harvest it commercially, it is difficult to find.
“We’ve looked extensively for la tagua tagua, which like an almond becomes completely blandita when it’s ripe and is protected inside a nido pelú,” one participant says. “You could see whether it was ripe and we’d break them to eat it. I haven’t seen them in 70 years. Not long ago, I went back to where I grew up and I didn’t find any.”
Buscábamos mucho la tagua tagua, que es como una almendra que cuando se madura es blandita completa y viene protegida dentro de un nido pelú. A través del nido se veía si estaba madura y la rompíamos para comerla. Desde que yo era niño, setenta años para atrás, es que no la veo, y hace poco fui al sitio donde nací y no vi ninguna en el bosque.
This statement references an entire ecosystem of knowledges that accompany the physical fruit, including patterns of growth, when you can consume it, and where to forage it. Not a fruit that you can price or easily find, tagua tagua is more of a surprising gift. The ability to forage and, in turn, taste tagua tagua is a reminder that our senses are an affirmation of a relationship to place, season, climate, and territory. To lose access to a specific fruit’s taste is a rupture. By recollecting, that is, presenting our empty palms upturned for cradling, we begin to collect again.