CANADA: A Montreal artist is planning to float a gigantic yellow banana in geostationary orbit above Texas next year, his website says, to stir residents' imagination and provoke comment.

The unconventional art project, partly backed by the Canada Council for the Arts and expected to cost about one million Canadian dollars, is the brainchild of Argentine-born artist Cesar Saez.

He plans to build the balloon out of bamboo and synthetic paper, and launch it from Baja or Sonora in northwestern Mexico in August 2008, he said on his website geostationarybananaovertexas.com.

About 300 metres long and filled with helium gas, it would be "clearly recognizable and visible day and night" as it drifts in a low orbit about 20-50 kilometres above Texas for up to a month, before it disintegrates.

A system of gyroscopes would help stabilize and keep it in place in the sky.

"Because it's possible. Why not a banana over Texas?" the 38-year-old told the Globe and Mail newspaper when pressed to explain why he would fly fruit over the United States.

"We address advertisement, we address entertainment, we address political issues," he said. "The issue of migration in the (United) States is another. The banana is built in Mexico and released in Mexico and enters in a furtive way."

On his website, Saez says a flight path over US President George W. Bush's home state was chosen "because it has oil, and a lot of Walmarts, Exxons and Halliburtons," as well as the president's ranch. "I wanted to bring some humor to the Texas sky."

But each person is expected to react differently and find their own meaning in the project, he added.

Preliminary work on the banana has been completed in Argentina, Cuba and Quebec. But more work and funding are needed. The Canadian and Quebec province governments have contributed 65,000 Canadian dollars, a local newspaper said.

A team of lawyers and experts from the Institute of Air Space Law at McGill University in Montreal is meanwhile putting together a legal brief in case Washington objects to the banana.

Flights above 25,000 meters in altitude are beyond US jurisdiction, they state in documents posted on Saez's website.