Witness, 2024-2025

Sofía Salazar Rosales, Witness, 2024-2025; Copper, glass agreggate, vinyl glue, fiberglass and polyester resin; 91 × 292 × 226 cm

Salazar Rosales investigates how everyday objects can embody social, economic, and political narratives—particularly those tied to human migration and the global circulation of goods.

Witness (2024-2025) is a sculptural work inspired by the overlooked remnants of a common fruit: the banana stem left behind after the fruit is consumed. Bananas are the major export of Ecuador, where the artist was born and grew up.Rosales was drawn to the way the stem blackens over time, seeing in it a quiet yet potent symbol of what remains after cycles of consumption and labor. She magnified this often-discarded form into a large-scale sculpture, 3D-printed and electroplated in copper to evoke both industrial processes and preciousness.

First exhibited at the Lyon Biennale (2024), Witness was newly coppered, but for it’s second iteration for Rosales’s final presentation at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, she oxidised the copper surface, allowing the material to age and evolve—mirroring the transformations embedded in the work’s concept.