'A Banana is not an Easy Thing'

- Shelley Sacks

Shelley Sacks is an artist who writes, teaches, performs and works across many disciplines to facilitate creative exchanges that empower people and lead to new ways of seeing our lives and the world around us. For the past 25 years Shelley Sacks has worked between South Africa, Germany and, since 1990, in the UK, exploring new forms of art and their relationship to the struggle for a sustainable and democratic society. Her work includes more than forty live actions, site works, and installations; involvement in grass roots cultural and political organisations; facilitating cooperatives in the 1970s and 1980s in South Africa; and collaborating with Joseph Beuys for more than a decade in the Free International University. She has been Head of Art at Oxford Brookes University since 1997, as Director of the Social Sculpture Research Unit.

The 20 sheets of skin suspended around the walls are made from dried, blackened banana skins from 20 boxes of Windward Island bananas. Each box of bananas has a 'grower identification number' stamped on it. Having used this number to trace the grower, the sheets of skin are linked to statements from the growers of the numbered boxes. In contrast to these identified sheets of skin, thousands of unnumbered skins fill the centre of the space. This installation EXCHANGE VALUES: Images of Invisible Lives is but one phase of a social sculpture that has involved numerous processes, stages and a great many people across several countries. It has also had a rather long gestation period.

I began drying banana skins 25 years ago, not for any specific purpose, but because I found it hard to throw them away. I would stand with a skin in my hand, wondering where it had come from, who had grown it, what the life of this person was like. Each skin still had so much life in it, it seemed a pity to throw it away. So I stretched strings across the wall of my room, where the skins could hang to dry. As they dried, blackening, twisting, stiffening, they began to speak through their silent forms.

When in 1973 I was due to leave for Germany, I had hundreds of dried, blackened banana skins, filling a small wooden trunk. A friend advised me to empty the trunk and make compost. But these skins held much more than their physical properties. These relics seemed to reflect our world economy and the producers of everything we need and use: producers who, though all working to satisfy the needs of another, are nevertheless locked into forms of trade and work that extract profits for others, exploit the world's resources for others, and distort the relationship between producers and consumers in a way that ultimately benefits neither, except those 'playing the market'. So I took the trunk of dried banana skins with me and, not surprisingly, had enormous difficulties explaining myself at customs. This experience gave me a sense, though, of the kind of discussion the skins could provoke. It dawned on me that if I laid out the skins from my banana trunk and read these skins for others - not quite as my grandmother read the tea leaves in a cup, as this 'story' needed no clairvoyance - I could engage people in reflection and discussion about our world economy and the society in which we live. On several occasions in different cities, I sat on a cloth, with the banana skins spread out, reading the picture of the world economy for passers-by. Although this led to many interesting discussions, reading the banana skins was overtaken by other actions and explorations. Nevertheless, whenever I ate a banana I would hang up the skin, although I had no particular reason for doing so.

When I came to the UK in 1990 I again brought the banana skins with me. Discussions about GATT 'free trade' agreements and the effect this would have on banana growers in regions like the Windward Islands were regularly in the news. After 20 years of keeping dried banana skins but not intending to do anything more with them, I found myself possessed by an image of sheets of blackened banana skin, strung up around the walls of a gallery, like dark, uniform rectangles of minimalist art. On closer contact one might realise that these apparently seamless and silent forms (that echo the ways we have collected and pinned out, not only butterflies, but lives and cultures) were skins, the skins of people's lives, and of an economic process, in which the interconnections between consumers and producers are manipulated and concealed.

Thinking I would use the skins collected over the years to stitch into these sheets of skin, I began to experiment with ways of curing and preparing the skins for stitching. Then, in the supermarket one day, I noticed a 'grower identification number' on a box of Windward Island bananas. I wondered who this number referred to. Could the grower of a specific box of bananas be traced? Would there be a way to get the skins back from consumers? And, if so, how would one know which box of bananas the skins had come from?

My questions led me, in early 1993, to contact Geest, the company that then still had control of Windward bananas; Mr. Bernard Cornibert, a representative of the Windward Island Banana Growers Association in London (now the grower owned Windward Islands Banana Development & Exporting Company - WIBDECO); the Latin America Bureau; and a journalist, Polly Pattullo, who had done work on the Windward Islands. I was told it should be possible to trace the growers from the numbers stamped on the boxes and advised to focus on St. Lucia, this being the island with the most intensive banana production.

Collecting the Numbered Skins

In June 1996, after more than 3 years of discussions, research and planning, the process of collecting the skins from numbered boxes of bananas began.

The first plan for collecting the skins from numbered boxes was to ask supermarket consumers to return their banana skins in a freepost envelope. The grower number corresponding to their bananas would be written on the envelope when they selected the fruit. Lengthy discussions with several supermarkets at a national and local level led to an agreement with one national chain that would allow the necessary contact with consumers as they selected their bananas. However, a trial dispatch of skins through the post raised the problem of mould. Clearly another method of collecting these numbered skins had to be developed, despite all the organisation that had gone into getting permission to collect the skins in supermarkets. The only feasible alternative was to get numbered boxes of bananas from the supplier, hand the bananas out and get the skins returned on the spot.

Now I needed sponsorship for the bananas and a venue for distributing them. Mr. Cornibert (WIBDECO) representing the Windward banana growers in London, supported a request to Geest for 25 randomly selected boxes of bananas from the Windward Islands. If I was going to attempt to trace the growers, it was preferable if the boxes came from one region. Since the majority of the bananas we eat in Britain come from the Windward Islands, and more than half of these from St. Lucia, this was the obvious choice.

Getting permission to distribute the bananas in Nottingham city centre was not so easy. The Council were worried that it might cause conflict with the licensed fruit traders.

In the meantime I had also made contact with Barbara Brockway, the Head of Research at the Body Shop, who, excited by the project, agreed to try and dry large quantities of 'unnumbered' banana skins in their kilns, that would be used to contrast with the numbered 'sheets of skin' around the walls. Hearing about my struggle to distribute the bananas she suggested bringing in a local Body Shop who agreed to let us distribute bananas outside the shop.

On two Saturdays in June 1996, for 9 hours a day, 3000 bananas were distributed to individual passers-by. Assisted primarily by my eight year old daughter, Rosa van Wyk, students, colleagues and my elder daughter, Khanya Price Evans - we gave every eater of a banana the corresponding grower number in exchange for their banana skin. Groups of people collected throughout the day to find out more about the project and discuss questions of world trade, fair-trade and consumer responsibility provoked by the project.

After this 'festival' of banana eating in the city, there were 3000 skins to be hung up and dried and, to stop them going mouldy, this was a matter of urgency! Once dry, they were stored in numbered bags ready for stitching.

In July 1996 we began stitching the sheets of skin. After a fairly lengthy process that includes soaking, curing the skins in salt water and pressing them under weights to flatten them, the skins are then stitched whilst damp and flexible onto backing cloth. Most of the sheets of skin were stitched with the help of two assistants, Elizabeth Cadd and Rebecca Swaine, each sheet of skin taking about 17 hours to complete.

Whilst the process of stitching the numbered sheets of skin got underway, I visited St. Lucia in the Windward Islands, with my small assistant, Rosa, and support from the Foundation for Sport and the Arts, East Midlands Arts and the Bonnington Gallery, Nottingham, to try and trace the growers of the 25 numbered boxes of bananas from the grower identification numbers printed on the side of each box.

Estella Magliore, from WIBDECO in London, greatly assisted us in making contact with the director of the St. Lucia Banana Growers Association, Peter Serieux. We left for St. Lucia with 25 grower numbers and an assurance of support from the St. Lucia Banana Growers Association to help us identify the locations of the growers. Little did we realise how much support we would need to meet with these 25 growers.

For a month Rosa and I traveled up and down the volcanic mountains and valleys of this island that looks like paradise - supported by a whole network of people from the St. Lucia Banana Growers Association. Senior managers organised for regional managers to take us to their regions, and regional managers gave their field workers and extention officers days off to help us locate and reach the farmers. Without their knowledge of the areas they work in and their four wheel drive vehicles, we would probably have found few of the farmers. On the least successful days, we would drive for hours, stopping regularly to inquire as to the whereabouts of a farmer, only to arrive at their plot to find they had taken their bananas to the docks. Sometimes it took several hours in the mountainous and muddy terrain to reach a farmer's plot, high up in the mountains, bordering rainforest. We would hoot and wait on the track, in blistering heat, or tropical winds and pelting rain, for the grower of one of the 25 boxes of bananas to emerge out of the dense banana plantations that stretch up the mountains and deep into the valleys. Here I had long conversations with the field officers and passing farmers. We waited, talking through the project: - reflecting on Britain's relationship to St. Lucia from the days of slavery to the present; discussing the struggle with the US and the multinationals; talking about the new grower ownership of the plots, as well as the value of a banana. How is the worth of this fruit, once known as 'green gold', measured? What is this fruit, the world's fifth largest food crop, really worth? Curiosity about consumer tastes and consumer demands led to discussions about ways of developing the relationship between producers and consumers, as well as consumer responsibility. When a consumer has money in their pocket is their only responsibility to themselves? Should they seek to buy the cheapest banana, the cheapest pair of shoes? Or should they, having informed themselves as far as possible about the social and environmental costs, consider other criteria, in addition to that of cost?

Most of the meetings with the growers took place on the weekly harvest day, at small iron harvesting shacks on the edge of the growers' plots. On harvest days the whole family and additional workers work long hours to pick, carry, wash and pack the bananas according to detailed instructions given out by the banana growers' association. At the end of the day they are then transported by the farmer, often over tortuous roads, to the banana ships, or if a grower has no transport, carried to an Inland Buying Depot. Although great care will have been taken through all the growing, picking and packing stages not to damage the fruit in any way, the poor condition of most roads can cause bruising beyond the farmer's control. And bruises are only one of many factors that determine the quality grading the bananas will be given at the wharf. The quality grading directly effects the money a farmer will receive for that week's harvest. The farmers complain bitterly about this grading system, largely because only 6 boxes out of their entire week's harvest are checked, not necessarily representing the overall quality of their harvest. This, together with the massive fluctuations in the prices paid for each grade, means that farmers often return home (having worked hard, adhered to all the quality control measures, and had a good harvest) with insufficient money to cover the equipment and chemicals that they are required to use, to pay the additional workers who are needed to assist on harvest days, and certainly unable to buy their children's schoolbooks!

Nowadays there are so many factors that determine what a family will earn for their week's crop, that anxiety on harvest days runs very high. On these days, more so than any other, one begins to see what multinational competition and manipulation has done to the whole process of farming, whilst as consumers, we are led to believe such competition is healthy because it pushes prices down. What multinational power really does is push anything in its way into a corner - from sustainable methods of farming to independent producers that it cannot threaten and control as it can its wage labourers! Although some of the farmers we met in St. Lucia seemed despairing. bewildered and confused as to who to blame for the misery caused by price fluctuations, the majority are angry and aware that the fluctuating prices and the fates of their families have little to do with bananas or how hard they work. Some blame the government, or the 'growers associations'. Others talk about multinationals playing 'a money game'.

Over the weeks we were in St. Lucia, we met with many farmers, including 19 of the farmers corresponding to the 25 randomly selected boxes of bananas, and heard many different points of view. We were increasingly drawn into discussions about the 'banana situation' and strategies for the future. Over the past few years the banana strategy in St. Lucia seems to have been to try to compete with the multinationals by perpetually trying to increase quality and yield. But now, as the enormous multinationals can afford to flood the market for weeks at a time with underpriced bananas, and the shortcomings of this strategy become apparent -what happens? On the one hand there is more pressure to increase chemical inputs to maintain yields and unnaturally 'neat' fruit. On the other, although the small farmers of the Windward Islands now have the chance to control their banana production, they are being told by the St. Lucian Prime Minister - after a few centuries of slavery and colonialism - to diversify into international tourism!

Most of the people we met with were keen to find ways out of these dead ends engineered by the profiteers and opportunists. They have not bowed to multinational control of bananas, nor will they accept any pretense of participation in the discussion about strategies for the future. Apart from a few, really despairing people, none of the farmers we met want to see St. Lucia, or any of the Windward Islands, become countries of waiters and hotel porters. There are individuals, in the existing Banana Growers Associations, interested in exploring sustainable and practical alternatives, and now that all banana marketing and distribution is no longer controlled by Geest - the company that controlled Windward Bananas for decades - alternative strategies are possible. WINFA, the organisation that has been engaged in developing strategies to produce healthier bananas for the 'fair-trade' market, is an umbrella organisation of independent farmers' organisations in the Windward Islands.

At the request of several farmers we were able to put growers from different areas, with a common desire for independent discussion of alternative strategies, in contact with one another. This was a positive development not envisaged at the outset. Just before we left, Saturday TV broadcast an interview about the project. In this prime time report slot, I was not only able to present social sculpture as a new form of art that involves people in the imaginative re-envisioning and shaping of our world, but to highlight the widespread interest that exists amongst farmers in alternative strategies of sustainably produced bananas, diversified farming, producer/consumer links and fair-trade.

Although central to this project there are obviously many environmental, social, and political concerns, I do not consider Exchange Values: Images of Invisible Lives to be an informative, documentary show. Nor is it an artwork that simply has social and environmental issues as its subject matter or theme. For me it is the kind of large scale social sculpture that lifts the creative process out of the specialist world of art into a realm in which we all have the possibility to become artists: social sculptors, engaged in the shaping of our world.

The art-work is therefore not only what happens when the viewer stands in front of a sheet of skin, listening to the voice of its grower, entering the work with their creative imagination. Nor is it the sum total of imaginative work involved in all the discussion and exchanges throughout its development.The art-work is both these things, including the ongoing imaginative reflections, discussions and exchanges that many people have been drawn into: reflections on the role of the imagination in re-envisioning our world, in rethinking agriculture, progress, value, money, and our global social- economic structures.

As I went from farmer to farmer with my sample sheet of skin I became more convinced than ever of how motivated, creative and inspired people become when they engage with a situation imaginatively. As one of the farmers said: "You can see from this 'skin' that a banana is not an easy thing. It has our lives in it. Our culture. Our struggle. Maybe people will see that even if we love bananas, we can't go on like this anymore. Something has to change".

This work tries to give us a sense that entering imaginatively into our world is part of an artistic process. It suggests that our ability to make changes in our society depends on the ability to picture what is going on in our lives and our world, and to re-envision alternatives. In this sense we are all artists, forming pictures, re-envisioning and reshaping our society.

So, whilst highlighting the 'invisible producers' of all that we use and need, as well as the relationships between producers and consumers in our complex global economy, this work presents the art of the future as human beings engaged in the shaping of our lives and society. This living art is able to explore and engage with anything and everything in our lives. It uses materials available to us all: images, speech and thought. To become active, creative participants in the shaping of our society is not only our right and responsibility, but lies within our reach.

Shelley Sacks