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You might remember Harambe, the famous gorilla that was killed by the staff at the Cincinnati Zoo back in 2016 after it grabbed and dragged a child who was trying to climb into its cage.
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A new seven-foot-tall bronze statue of the animal is now trying to make a point about wealth disparity in downtown New York. Found at Bowling Green Park (between Broadway and Whitehall Street, to be exact), right across from the famous Charging Bull in the Financial District, the sculpture is the work of Sapien.Network, a new social networking platform dedicated to "putting the needs and welfare of human beings first."
There's more: the company has also splayed about 10,000 bananas around the Charging Bull. The action has quite the literal meaning: the fruits, which will eventually be donated to local community fridges and food banks, are meant to show how "bananas" Wall Street has become.
Sapien.Network co-founder Robert Giometti told NBC News 4 that "Harambe is a representation of something that lets us look at more than just ourselves. What are we aspiring to as people?" He went on: "It's about connecting. A simple gesture of giving a banana builds community. As a society, we need to come together. We can't keep fighting to come together."
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According to Market Watch, the whole ordeal is a temporary, pop-up installation, meant "to highlight how out of touch Wall Street has become to the needs of everyday people and to challenge the Street's uncompassionate capitalism." Specifically, the exhibit seeks to highlight "the outrageous disparity in wealth between the 1% and everyone else."
Although we wholeheartedly agree with Giometti's message, we must say that the use of a fictional Harambe seems a bit off-kilter and worthy of a larger discussion. That, perhaps, is the point of the whole thing?