Dried banana skin collage from Rwanda

Last week we had an amazing visit at the office, a couple of nurse nuns that had helped our reporters to move around and see the reality of Rwanda during their visit there some time ago. Both of them had the chance to travel to Spain last week and made some time to visit our place and tell us the current situation they're living everyday in Rwanda, close to the Congo border, such a difficult place to be.

Having the chance to listen to them first hand was quite an interesting and energizing experience, it's impressive to meet people who have their life at stake everyday, in a place where people actually get imprisoned over 30 years for something like stealing a chair, where it's not rare to find a corpse buried in your backyard or what not, yet they manage to keep balance between a critic and a positive mind and face it all with a smile on the face, authentic is the only word that comes to my mind to describe them.

This authentic people did bring some gifts all the way from Rwanda with them -as if they needed to- and I must say I'm the luckiest one since the gift of their choice was art! What? YES, ART!!!

Ok, I've never ever seen something like this and while they were talking about the gifts before taking them out I couldn't believe what they were saying, something done exclusively with banana skin and leaves? no way! but alas, it's indeed true! This piece is a collage on textured paper - around 16.5x8 inches - and there's not a single drop of ink there, it's 100% dried banana skin with some tiny bits of banana tree leaves, and you should see it in real life! the texture is amazing! when my turn to choose came and I got to get off the way with my brand new collage I couldn't help keep touching it, it's so firm and textured that's ridiculous! Hopefully nobody saw me in my "my preeeecioouuuuuusssss" moment or it would have been quite embarrassing hehehe!

Gotta frame it and put it on my wall, I'm so in love with it at the moment!

Click to enlarge! not the best of the photos but it's really easy to see all the texture in the large image