The Figures Carved Into the Knife by the Sap of the Banana Trees

Joana Pimenta, 14 min. (2014)

With its indelible images and an air of mystery, Joana Pimenta’s The Figures Carved into the Knife by the Sap of the Banana Trees mines an archive of correspondence between the island of Madeira and the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique. Because Pimenta’s source material is supplemented by fictive memories, imagination comes to fill in the lacunae of a long-suppressed history. Part postcard, part landscape film, part auto-fiction, The Figures Carved is both a sensual and sensory experience. (Harvard Art Museum)