Can you hear her breathing?, 2025

Can you hear her breathing?, 2025, Bronze, band-aid, 50 × 31 × 14.5 cm

After moving to the Netherlands, Cuban-Ecuadorian artist Sofía Salazar Rosales noticed that most of the bananas being sold at the grocery stores came from the same company based in Ecuador. As a lot of the packaging was being incorporated in the fruit aisle or handed out at the check-out line as additional packaging for customers, this packaging material became an interesting connection to her home and a source of inspiration for this series of sculptures.

In Can’t you hear them breathing?, 2024, the artist took the stiff packing wrapper that protected the bananas during transport and incorporated them into a new sculpture. Hanging on the wall, the individual bronze banana wrapper resembles empty armor, maintaining its functionality as objects of protection. While the artist normally chooses to reproduce items and objects of important value to her, this series directly incorporates the individual wrappers. To preserve the hollowed banana shapes, Salazar Rosales worked with a foundry in Italy to solidify these unique shapes by encasing them with bronze using a method called electroplating. On top of this, the artist uses medical tape to replicate the foliage of the banana plant seen on the original packing material.