Fruits that are stones. Stones that are seeds.

Regina José Galindo, Fruta amarga, 2024 - 2025. © Roberto Ruiz

In the early hours of June 14, 2024, artist Regina José Galindo slept outdoors in the city of Lleida. She did not sleep on the ground, but on top of nectarines stacked in a rectangular plexiglass box that served as a mattress. She did not sleep under a bridge but in Berenguer IV Square, in front of the Lleida–Pirineus train station. The choice of mattress filling is not accidental; it is the fruit harvested by the hands of seasonal workers who come to work every year in the agri–food sector, the economic engine of the Lleida region. The choice of location is also not coincidental; the train station is the gateway to the city and one of the main pick–up points for seasonal workers. The artistic action, entitled Bitter fruit[1], embodies an picture we see every summer: that of people who, after exhausting workdays, end up sleeping on the streets^[2]. People, mostly from the Maghreb and sub–Saharan Africa, whose lives are shaped by Spain’s Immigration Law, which prevents legal and swift access to the labor market and fosters their precarization and labor exploitation. People who, as anthropologist and activist Gemma Casals Fité points out, “are a minority among the 40,000 who arrive each year,” yet “a very large and significant minority when it comes to rights violations”^[3].

 

Every year, between 25,000 and 40,000 people from around the world arrive in Lleida to work in the fruit harvest. Some are migrants residing in Spain who move across the peninsula to take part in agricultural campaigns. Most of these workers find jobs, but not all of them obtain formal contracts. Between May and September, their hands pick and pack cherries, apricots, plums, peaches, nectarines, flat peaches, pears, and apples. The men work in the fields, while the women work in the cold storage rooms. The province of Lleida produces 77% of Catalonia’s fruit output^[4]. In turn, Lleida’s agri–food sector accounts for 57% of Catalonia’s exports of fruit, vegetables, pulses, fats, oils and meat products^[5]. However, the value that fruit represents for the local economy is not necessarily reflected in the working conditions or labor rights of the seasonal workers: many work up to 16 hours a day and earn below the minimum wage; they are denied housing or live in degrading conditions; they struggle to register as residents; they suffer from unpaid wages or uncompensated overtime; they are not registered with social security; and they live in fear of reprisals for claiming their rights.

 

Article 39 of the Catalonia Agricultural Agreement (2021) establishes that employers are obliged to provide accommodation for seasonal workers whose workplace is more than 75 km from their usual residence^[6]. Organizations defending the rights of seasonal workers, such as Fruit with Social Justice[7], have reported cases of non–compliance with the agreement by employers.^[8]. Three recently published news stories remind us of the situation of vulnerability experienced by the people who harvest “our fruit.” The first is the publication of a scientific study confirming that half of seasonal workers in Lleida work in a state of dehydration, which can lead to chronic health problems such as kidney failure or cardiovascular disease^[9]. The second was the death of a day laborer from heatstroke while picking fruit on a field in Alcarràs, under temperatures exceeding forty degrees Celsius. ^[10]. The third case involved dismantling a labor exploitation network in Bajo Cinca (Huesca) and freeing 280 seasonal workers who were living in overcrowded, unsanitary substandard housing and working in slave–like conditions. The investigation, which led to the indictment of temporary employment agencies and the arrest of eight individuals for labor crimes, found that the operation replicated human trafficking dynamics, such as withholding documentation and part of the victims' wages to ensure their dependence and exploitation^[11].

 

Let's compare Bitter Fruit with The Universe of Fruit, an illustration by Lleida–based artist Sonia Alins (2023) in which we see a community of people surrounded by fruit trees —individuals of all ages and skin colors, consumers and producers alike, eating peaches, apples, pears, and cherries in a cheerful mood. Formally, the figures are rendered in a naive style dominated by the color violet, a symbol of feminist struggles for women's rights and gender diversity. Iconographically, the work recreates the pastoral, a theme with classical roots that was widespread in Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries, depicting scenes of country life featuring shepherds, farmers, animals, and lush nature. Pastorals extolled the simplicity, innocence, love, and peace of rural life, which stood in contrast with the corruption of urban life. These scenes depict idyllic landscapes, agricultural workers in loving or contemplative attitudes, often accompanied by flocks, nymphs, or mythological deities^[12]. However, what these images conceal—by idealizing rural life—are the poverty, hard labor, and social inequalities that affected agricultural workers. In fact, such idealization served the urban and courtly elites, who consumed these works as symbolic refuges detached from the peasant reality. In this way, the pastoral renders invisible the material conditions of peasants, transforming them into aesthetic figures for the enjoyment of the upper classes.

 

Sonia Alins' bucolic scene transports us to an idealized world devoid of social inequalities, exploitation, and precariousness. Coated with a patina of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and feminism, the artist's aesthetic figures distract from the labor vulnerability not only of seasonal workers, but also of farmers themselves. The neoliberal agro–industrial model has profoundly transformed the rural world, allowing the concentration of land, capital, and power in the hands of large corporations, distributors, and investment funds that control the entire production chain. This concentration subordinates small farmers, who lose decision–making power, fall into debt, and in many cases abandon the land. At the same time, agribusiness organizes work in global chains based on seasonality and mobility, employing precarious migrant laborers who lack labor rights and stability. Moreover, farmers have become dependent on industrial resources—agrochemicals, hybrid seeds, and machinery—resulting in a form of technological extractivism and the loss of local knowledge and cultivated biodiversity. Productive intensification degrades soils, pollutes aquifers, and reduces biodiversity, compromising the future of agricultural work. This scenario discourages generational renewal and promotes deruralization. Hence the need to promote agroecological models based on local production, food sovereignty, short supply chains, community management, and the dignification of rural labor.

 

This reality stands in stark contrast to Alins’s idealized representation. As Gemma Casals has argued, “the stereotypical image of a rural world where peasants care for the land through agricultural production is more a mirage than a reality.” It may not be coincidental that Sonia Alins’s work was commissioned by Afrucat^[13], the Catalan fruit industry association based in Lleida, which brings together cooperatives and private companies engaged in the production, storage, marketing, and export of fruit^[14]. In any case, Galindo and Alins' works perform very different artistic functions: Bitter Fruit seeks to question and transform the established order, whereas The Universe of Fruit keeps it intact. Both projects are the result of ethico–political operations that dispel any illusion of neutrality. Galindo's work produces dissensual subjectivities, while Alins' work reproduces normative ones. Perhaps for this reason, Regina José Galindo’s performance received dozens of racist comments on social media^[15], whereas Alins’s illustration won international awards for design and artistic communication^[16].

 

Focusing on the vulnerability of seasonal workers is not an attack on farmers. It is about recognizing the importance of a workforce that each year harvests hundreds of tons of fruit destined for export across thousands of kilometers for consumption. While agricultural goods enjoy full mobility and institutional protection, the workers who produce them face borders, controls, and legal exclusion. Our agricultural system needs migrant labor to sustain its harvests. However, Spain’s Immigration Law does not offer sufficient or flexible legal channels to meet this need. This creates a paradox: the economy depends on workers whom the law renders invisible or marginalizes. This same law reproduces and legitimizes structural forms of racism, as it institutionalizes a hierarchy among people, associates non–European migration with control and suspicion, criminalizes administrative irregularity, favors labor exploitation, and dehumanizes citizenship. It is a law that turns differences in origin and nationality into legal, labor, and social inequalities—a law that promotes institutional racism that requires neither insults nor violence but operates instead through forms, permits, and borders.

 

Sleeping on freshly picked nectarines is like sleeping on stones. Yet Regina José Galindo’s nectarines may also be seeds of a different future. As writer María Sánchez notes about Bitter Fruit (Fruita amarga),

"A body finally rests, despite the effort, precariousness, vulnerability, discrimination, and racism; despite the fruit. It even seems that the dream that envelops it is pleasant; that there is reparation, silence, and calm. As if among the fruits that sustain the body there were space for food—and everything behind it—to continue to be part of a language of care, generosity, and affection, of a world that fights for access to food and a dignified life, among other things, to be a right for all”^[17].

 

 

BIO

Christian Alonso is a cultural researcher, art curator, and university teacher specializing in art and ecology. He is lecturer in art history at the University of Lleida and director of the artistic research project Hybrid Ecologies of the Llobregat Delta. He has previously served as director of the La Panera Art Centre for Art, adjunct professor at the ESDI School of Design–Ramon Llull University, coordinator of the curatorial studies program On Mediation, and project coordinator for the research group Art, Globalization, Interculturality (University of Barcelona). He holds a PhD in Art History (University of Barcelona), with an international distinction (Utrecht University), based on a dissertation that rethinks artistic practice through the ethico–aesthetic philosophy of Félix Guattari. His work is framed within critical posthumanities and environmental humanities. His research interests include multispecies relations, queer ecologies, and naturcultural extractivisms. He has extensive experience in research, teaching, management, coordination, production, and communication of curatorial, mediation, and artistic production projects, both nationally and internationally. Website: https://christianalonso.net/