This conceptual paper contributes to emerging conversations on the meaning of materiality and embodiment in positioning processes. We demonstrate how the positioning of an artifact, a banana, can become analytically inseparable from students’ positioning during small-group interactions.Methodologically grounded in multi-modal analyses of socio-material positioning processes, we empirically root this study in 23 seconds of video data, displaying a group of five engineering students in a project-based sustainability course. We ask (1) how artifacts become positioned with people as sociomaterial entanglements and (2) how artifactual positioning contributes to transforming abstract concepts into concrete understanding. Our analysis follows an artifact’s entanglement with students’ positioning in learning situations in processes of first- to second-, and third-order positioning. More concretely, drawing on the artifactual materiality of the banana, students move from an abstract level of understanding the concept of ‘social pressure’ in the context of Swedish fika to a concrete and embodied example of how social pressure operates for everyone and themselves. Mapping this process empirically and theoretically, we visualize how artifactual positioning facilitates learning, and we suggest multimodality as a methodological tool for further theory development and empirical research.